Guild Wars 2

Before I’m shot down by the inevitable people that don’t read this post fully and say: “WTF ELES ARE SO WEAK RIGHT NOW AND THEIR DOWNED STATE WAS A JOKE” let me say this:

The previous Ele downed state was too weak. I concede this.

HOWEVER

As it was currently, and lazily (a disgusting pattern I’m finding from ANet as way to approach many issues in their game) changed to it TOO STRONG.

Let’s ignore how hard it is with a current Ele bunker spec to get downed in the first place with 2-3 people on you and plenty of stability:

Mist form has NO COUNTER PLAY This is the biggest flaw. There is NOTHING you can do to finish an Ele properly without devoting too many resources or overextending off the point to finish them.

When you come out of mist form, YOUR DOWNED HEALTH RESETS this means you CANNOT counterplay an Ele to mist form by dpsing their downed state, because their health will reset and your efforts will be for nothing. You HAVE to waste a finishing animation on a competent Ele before they mist form, or they will just sit their happily doing damage while you can do literally NOTHING to stop them.

Also mobility. Mist form is unarguably the strongest mobile downed state in the game. The repositioning potential on Mist form is UNLIMITED. You can go off a cliff, behind a wall, all things that FORCE people to overextend to finish you, or your guaranteed to get back up.

Let’s go over other classes and counterplay to their downed state:
Warrior, Ranger, Guardian, Necromancer, Engineer- Stability counters these and you can finish them without pause.

Warrior, Engineer, Necromancer-Having two people finish them, stability not required.

Thief- Teleport with the thief (guardian, thief, mesmer, ele) while finishing them. OR just sneeze at them with aoe and force them to teleport, then sneeze again and they die.

Mesmer- AoE, knowing how the mesmer downed clones appear and it what order.

There is counterplay to every single other class, why is Ele an exception? What kind of design is this to have ONE class far superior than all the others?

NO I’m not asking for a revert. I’m asking for a change.

My proposal, but ANet is far more creative:

REMOVE MIST FORM OFF DOWNED STATE. Period. It was fine when it was on 3, but that makes them a free stomp. So remove it completely, or put it back on 3.

REPLACE Mist form with an interrupt.

-2. Cone of Lightning. Elementalist delivers a shock in a cone in front of the direction his camera is facing, this dazes all hit for 1 second.

This would be an interrupt on PAR with all the other classes, and COUNTERABLE with stability.

All other classes’ downed state can be countered, how is this acceptable that Eles cannot?

Seems fine to me. It’s pretty much even if not slightly below thief and mesmer. Then again those are considered too strong as well. You can dps an ele down after the first mist form, you have to force the first one though.

Considering all other things that need to be fixed in mind for Ele, unless they also get balanced, how about no…

Below thief and mesmer?

What the kitten?

Thieves and mesmers HP do NOT reset when they use their 2. You can just kill them with damage and they can do **** all about it.

Eles hp RESET every time they use mist form, and are invulnerable while they use it, and can go anywhere unlike thieves whose teleport is one plane and can be blocked by LoS

Swim.6830:

Considering all other things that need to be fixed in mind for Ele, unless they also get balanced, how about no…

This is part of the “laziness” that disgusts me.

Eles class are “broken” and “unbalanced” (a whole nother thread for this, but I don’t buy this for a second with the Eles I’ve seened), so lets just give them an OP downed state to “balance” it out.

But on the other hand, Rangers most viable burst spec was nerfed (SB) and broken, so lets nerf that to “balance” their OP spec while leaving the rest of their kit below par and some parts unusable.

Where is the fairness in this approach ANet?

@Odaman you give the impression of not having read op’s full post. Mist form is clearly better than thief and mesmer.

OP has a point. I think they won’t do anything drastic, but possibly remove the damage reset. I think it would still be the best #2 even after that simply because you can move yourself, but it would not be unmanageable.

Elementalists now have a short-lived escape, just like any other class, which is fine for now. Before, they could just lay there and wait to be killed, now they can at least do something usefull.

Besides, at the moment warriors have the best downed state. Who wouldn’t love to revive for several seconds with alot of boons, and take someone with you in death? Warriors should have that downed state removed, to get them down to the same level as other classes.

Everyone should just have an interrupt and/or an escape. That simple.

You didn’t read my post clearly.

You can have two people finish a warrior OR use stability, and the warriors CAN NOT VENGEANCE and WILL be finished 100% of the time.

I also said Eles previous state was weak.

please read before posting.

The level of brain activity in this thread is lowering with each new poster.
“warriors have best downed state”
/thread

Before I’m shot down by the inevitable people that don’t read this post fully and say: “WTF ELES ARE SO WEAK RIGHT NOW AND THEIR DOWNED STATE WAS A JOKE” let me say this:
The previous Ele downed state was too weak. I concede this.
HOWEVER
As it was currently, and lazily (a disgusting pattern I’m finding from ANet as way to approach many issues in their game) changed to it TOO STRONG.
Let’s ignore how hard it is with a current Ele bunker spec to get downed in the first place with 2-3 people on you and plenty of stability:
Mist form has NO COUNTER PLAY This is the biggest flaw. There is NOTHING you can do to finish an Ele properly without devoting too many resources or overextending off the point to finish them.
When you come out of mist form, YOUR DOWNED HEALTH RESETS this means you CANNOT counterplay an Ele to mist form by dpsing their downed state, because their health will reset and your efforts will be for nothing. You HAVE to waste a finishing animation on a competent Ele before they mist form, or they will just sit their happily doing damage while you can do literally NOTHING to stop them.
Also mobility. Mist form is unarguably the strongest mobile downed state in the game. The repositioning potential on Mist form is UNLIMITED. You can go off a cliff, behind a wall, all things that FORCE people to overextend to finish you, or your guaranteed to get back up.
Let’s go over other classes and counterplay to their downed state:
Warrior, Ranger, Guardian, Necromancer, Engineer- Stability counters these and you can finish them without pause.
Warrior, Engineer, Necromancer-Having two people finish them, stability not required.
Thief- Teleport with the thief (guardian, thief, mesmer, ele) while finishing them. OR just sneeze at them with aoe and force them to teleport, then sneeze again and they die.
Mesmer- AoE, knowing how the mesmer downed clones appear and it what order.
There is counterplay to every single other class, why is Ele an exception? What kind of design is this to have ONE class far superior than all the others?
NO I’m not asking for a revert. I’m asking for a change.
My proposal, but ANet is far more creative:
REMOVE MIST FORM OFF DOWNED STATE. Period. It was fine when it was on 3, but that makes them a free stomp. So remove it completely, or put it back on 3.
REPLACE Mist form with an interrupt.
-2. Cone of Lightning. Elementalist delivers a shock in a cone in front of the direction his camera is facing, this dazes all hit for 1 second.
This would be an interrupt on PAR with all the other classes, and COUNTERABLE with stability.
All other classes’ downed state can be countered, how is this acceptable that Eles cannot?

As I’ve said before here, you don’t have to omghurrystomp something. Mist form grants an ele a very small window of survival, so that maybe they can use the 3 button that does mediocre damage and CC.(which is can be countered) The 3 seconds of the ele running hoping to get some help isn’t that bad, and once it’s on cool down you can dps us down should you not want to finish. (really you can, I don’t know what you’re doing wrong here)
This thread is a perfect example of why Anet just can’t win. I feel so bad for game companies now.

Anyone claiming Ele downed state is not the strongest, is clearly trolling, or has never played competitive Tpvp. I lol’d at the above “even my grandma can see the trail left by the ele in mist form”
I mean, really? Do you not understand that the ele is the only class that can 100% avoid a first stomp?

I am not really arguing for a nerf, one class will always be above the rest. However, I am observing that clearly the ele is in a different state from the other classes.

OP is correct, the groups of classes, from least to greatest, is thus:

group 1: double stomp, no other utility needed to complete stomp:

Warrior, Engineer, Necromancer

group 2: some form of damage/cc avoidance is needed for a first stomp:

Ranger, Guardian

group 3: instant, targetable teleport, can be countered with a teleport from stomper:

Theif

group 4: delayed, un-targetable teleport, can be countered by a clever staggered double stomp, so the 2nd stomp goes down upon re-appear:

Mesmer

group 5: delayed, controllable movement. invulnerable for the time, resets health. No possible counter to achieve first stomp:

Elementalist

Q.E.D: Eles are best downed state. In Tpvp, the quick stomp is a must. Warrior never gets vengance. it doesn’t happen.

Ele’s do probably have the best downed state now simply because they’re the only ones that can always avoid the initial stomp, as mentioned.

Thieves can port but you can port with them if you’re fast enough (steal, shadowstep, lightning flash, blink, etc.). Mesmers can be double stomped by canceling and immediately restarting your stomp right as they use deception, which causes them to get stomped right as they reappear – works most of the time unless they happen to port out of range.

Tbh I wish they’d just make all the downed states identical.

It must be really difficult to play this game without knowing how other classes downed state works.

The way Arenanet handled this is hilariously disappointing. The worst part of it is that it’s probably asymptomatic of the way AN is handling balance in general – that is, making adjustments that are way too far in one or the other direction just to appease people.

If they can never get downed states balanced (which are considerably simpler than the rest of the game since every class gets the same set), how can they manage to balance everything else?

The mist form needs to have about .5-1sec taken off IMO.
Perfectly re-casting the stomp and blowing a utility to teleport and finish him should put it in line with other downstates (mesmer, thief).

I definitely agree that the ele down-state is kinda too strong, but just changing it to another AoE daze would be boring and throw their down state into useless-tier again. The thing with all classes is that they have something kinda special going for them - a stomp-stopper (be it invis, teleport or cc) followed by another skill (down-state heal for winning down-fights, vengeance for, uh, yeah, or simply another piece of damage/CC), but all of them have counterplay. Thief, engie and warrior can’t actually chain their 3 after their 2 if the stomper is competent, ranger, necro and guardian don’t really do anything after their CC and mesmer has already been explained in-thread.
For elementalists, there is no counterplay. They click 2 and just walk away, negating any work towards finishing them (be it a stomp or just general damage, cause they heal to full).

I’m sure ANet can come up with something good, but two ideas off the top of my head - don’t make mist form heal you and you can still take damage while in mist form (so it’s just used to move and avoid stomps) or move mist form back to 3, but make it have about 3.25 second cooldown, so that you can use it if you successfully immobilize someone before they stomp you (if you got downed whilst they were on your face? Well, stop getting downed whilst they’re on your face - literally every single profession faces this problem)

ya that was part of why, when you saw people post agreeing the Elementaist downed state was week, they mostly all said: “so lets nerf everybody elses to be like this.” and very few people said “lets buff ele.”

But anet is doing their own thing with downed state, that not very many people seem to agree with or support… either we just don’t understand the genius or they’re pulling a Diablo 3, I guess time will tell.

Elementalist finally gets something thats on par with all other professions and the whinig begins.
God, i usually play the weaker classes to avoid the whining and raging of people with personal problems or a grudge against the profession. I have been doing pvp since that patch but till now he Mist form has been handy and better to stall the stomp. But it never saved me nonetheless

To be honest I was pretty shocked when I found out they made the mistform the #2 because as others have stated, it was pretty much the strongest downstate ability available to anyone. I expected eles to get a single or multi target interrupt on #2 and then to have mistform either removed from #3 or put on a much longer cd than the original downstate.

Taking eles from the worse downstate to the best is a bit extreme though.

Aether McLoud.1975:

LOL jumper. You realize vapor form lasts 1.5 seconds?

What?

Vapor form is 3 seconds.

It really feels like people are not understanding fully just how strong mist form is with its damage reset and whatnot. Before you post, read OP please.

milo.6942:

It must be really difficult to play this game without knowing how other classes downed state works.

QFT…

This thread has made me realize how horrible a large portion of our community is at basic PvP and makes me shudder to think that these ignorant people and their baseless complaints are used time and again to shape ANets balance of classes…. (PW nerf, Assasin’s Signet Nerf, etc.)

So when a class that was considered to be one of the weakest (and it’s not) gets something good, people start to cry rivers? Do me a favor, cry a BIG one.

@Fate, kinda makes you sad doesn’t it….

@Lunacy your argument is irrelevant and misguided. Eles are one of the strongest and most versatile classes. Also the issue is not that they “got something good” but that it’s clearly a bit better than all other downed states now. Not that it should be removed, only that it should be adjusted slightly (imo anyway).

I Would say the Mist form should not remove damage, Right now it can avoid any type of stomp stability/dpsed/double/triple or w/e you can think of. Just make them lose health reset and it should be all ok though.

Better? It’s just fine. Or no wait….
Can they make me able to vengeance also? Or pop an illu that does 4-6k damage? Or give me stuff that would require 2-3 stomps?

Also milo, read. I said considered, coz most ppl just suck at eles and then rant on the forums. Eles require 1-2 stomps now instead of being a free stomp and it’s not like you can move that much with it, it lasts…2 seconds at most? In case most “informed” people don’t know, they nerfed the duration hard.

Ok so look this situation :

Ele captured your point but you came and killed him. he mist forms and runs behind Obsstable breaking LoS. You either leave point or let ele ressurect basicly. Thief can teleport however he he needs LoS to teleport so cant go behind obstacle that you cant see from place you planed to stomp him.
And yes mesmer phantasm when downed got too much damage.

ROFL I never thought we would see this kind of hilarious ele downed state thread :p

Playing elem before and after patch, I did like the old downed state a lot better…
I know everyone complained about old downed state but once you knew how to use it people had to stomp me very fast or I would never get stomped :p

New downed state is like mesmer or rogues, u get away once then u immediately get stomped .. They switched 2 and 3 and changed cooldowns, I think…
With old downed state once I would pop mist then I would just chain mist for ever.. nowadays its not possible anymore… Or a lot harder, ie need the ennemy to help with cooldown lol.

Yea I suppose it takes a lot of time and effort to get to someone who just moved 2 meters from you and take 2 seconds of your precious time to stomp him. I don’t know why I’m even arguing. This board is filled with the most hilarious and kitten complaints I’ve ever seen in a MMO anyway.

Its now equally as annoying as mesmer/thief downed state. Some sort of cosmic justice imo.

But its definitely a very lazy fix. The 2 ability should have been buffed substantially, make it a knock back + root for example (dodgeable), and just left 3 alone.

However its currently fine how it is, for now, until there is some normalizing on other downed states as well.

I main an Ele. I will say that this change absolutely took us from worst downed state to best. Do I think it needs to be nerfed? Not sure. The only real issue I see here is the main point being brought up by OP: I use it to stop downed finishers or to reset health if they get me too low. Then, when i use it I go into super-turbo-mode like I was shot out of a cannon lol.

Obviously I LIKE the move for me since for 2 months now I’ve been a free kill while downed. But, if they nerf it, I wouldn’t cry, nor be surprised.

This thread is proof as to why Anet should NEVER listen to any of you. Ever.

Good gravy Jesus, what do any of you do when you’re not complaining? Obviously this doesn’t apply to a very special 5% of you, but man… just have some fun for a change and stop whining.

I think people are really blowing this out of proportion. It’s strong, but it’s really not super op or anything close. Mist form is a short duration and you can see exactly where the ele is going and stomp them immediately. That’s a lot better than mesmers and thieves. I can finish off an ele a lot faster than either of those and with far less frustration.

The only potential complaint I could see about it is that it is infact top tier now, and if anet wants that to be the level of power in downed state, the other classes are going to need to be buffed up to that level, which might not be a good thing for the game.

Kat.5982:

I think people are really blowing this out of proportion. It’s strong, but it’s really not super op or anything close. Mist form is a short duration and you can see exactly where the ele is going and stomp them immediately. That’s a lot better than mesmers and thieves. I can finish off an ele a lot faster than either of those and with far less frustration.

The only potential complaint I could see about it is that it is infact top tier now, and if anet wants that to be the level of power in downed state, the other classes are going to need to be buffed up to that level, which might not be a good thing for the game.

I think that’s my problem. I didn’t like the old Ele downed state ONLY because it was out of balance with other classes, but I would prefer all classes to be like the old ele state instead of ele getting bumped up to the others. I do not like the downed state, but if it HAD to be in the game, I think the old ele had the model for it.

Really? So Elementalists, after getting their face crushed for weeks now with having nothing better to do than watch the person do it, finally! get a buff to give them at least a chance to live and the whining begins already? Never mind the fact almost everyone of their builds is useless and I would say by far, they are the worst class in PvP. Not even slightly worse, its a full assault of garbage coming at you. I’m sorry, but Ele’s need an extreme boost to become even with other classes in my opinion. I play a Ranger and even they are a pretty useless class right now but I can still beat ele’s without trouble. An elementalist is my alt, I had to pick the two worst classes around, but oh well. I feel good when I drop a cheesy Backstab thief etc.

Give eles a break, they can still only stop your stomp once. If you do it the moment you get them downed, they can’t always myst away. If anything, Thieves can still stall for way longer than anyone downed still.

MarcusKilgannon thats your L2P issue with elementalist beeing behind other classes. It has much highter skill requirments however is much better in experianced hands then most other classes. Anyways, atm ele stompbreak runaway is uncounterable and needs to be weakened so it has at least 1 counter, raw dps, fast finisher, or sth like that.

Lumines.3916:

Give eles a break, they can still only stop your stomp once. If you do it the moment you get them downed, they can’t always myst away. If anything, Thieves can still stall for way longer than anyone downed still.

The range eles run is longer then thiefs + they reset hp on mist form. Thief can teleport, stealth after 6 seconds after tp(stomping is like 5 seconds so its nough time) then after somewhat 3 more seconds tp again. In all that time we bleed taking heavy damage, unless you dont notice us. Ele dont bleed runs around and resets hp. Tell me which is more powerfull.

Stin, I’ve only ever come across 2 elementalists that were good. Everyone else playing is severely lacking or is it the class is underpowered? Because it seems odd that a person playing a thief, which you would assume would have some learning curve can almost always handle their character well and instant drop people like nothing. Which I proved when I made a thief with 2 other friends as thieves, making it to tournament finals without having a clue how to play the class. It’s not a L2P issue, it’s the class is below everyone else. Same with ranger, and if you think ranger is L2P, Arenanet made a post earlier this week stating there will be large changes to the class utilities etc. Why? Because the class is not as good as the majority.

lol this thread is a pretty clear example that ppl at top of the game play a different game than the casuals. The problem is what can Anet do to balance tpvp without pissing off 99% of the eles.

Down state is just dumb. remove down state from pvp.

MarcusKilgannon.5048:

Stin, I’ve only ever come across 2 elementalists that were good. Everyone else playing is severely lacking or is it the class is underpowered? Because it seems odd that a person playing a thief, which you would assume would have some learning curve can almost always handle their character well and instant drop people like nothing. Which I proved when I made a thief with 2 other friends as thieves, making it to tournament finals without having a clue how to play the class. It’s not a L2P issue, it’s the class is below everyone else. Same with ranger, and if you think ranger is L2P, Arenanet made a post earlier this week stating there will be large changes to the class utilities etc. Why? Because the class is not as good as the majority.

So class should be balanced for average player not for, the skillcap it can be playd upon at its best ? Is that what ur telling ?

I have met dozens of good elementalist and got 800+ games or so on thief around 70% tourament win rate, im sure i see more what classes are capable of, I also play simple Spvp from time to time and see new elementalists as fish bait only in Spvp. But how you imagine buffing class for easier play not increasing hight skill cap, to overally too hight levels.

tOss.9024:

This thread is a perfect example of why Anet just can’t win. I feel so bad for game companies now.

I think game developers understand that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and that forums are going to be filled with the irrational.

That said, it’s a bit frustrating to see Elementalists rush a WvWvW ZvZ line, get downed, and just mistform easily back to their line to be rezzed. There’s no risk to it for them anymore, but I would happily concede that for tPvP balance. As it stands, it seems like it’s pretty good, but broken? I think people need to calm down before that judgement is made. It’s hard to go from “Lol this is a free stomp” to “Omg he went all the way over there? Wtf”.

So, you cc lock them and kill them under 2 seconds, you try to stomp them, they mist away, you run over and stomp them because they are done. Problem?

no 1 second heart seeker kill downed ele rush to forums!

As ele players get better in general, the amount of QQ will simply increase.
Outside the bunker builds there are already power builds that make people kitten their pants , especially thieves and warriors who think twice…three times before engaging the same ele again, unless he’s already 10% HP running from a gank team and with everything on CD.

This thread is so hilarious, it reminds me vanilla WoW druids, the second worst class after (vanilla WoW) warlocks.

“WHAAAA they can’t kill anything, they SUCK so hard but they don’t auto-die as fast as I’d want to be (that is immediately).

Let’s bet on this: I bet we’ll still see the same faceroll classes in PvP, I don’t see 5 elementalists like now we see 5 thieves / mesmers etc.

Obviously, it’s perfectly fine when ele jumps off e.g. the keep/mine and if you want to stomp him, you will lose like 10 seconds total to get back to the point. I’m pretty sure the only people that disagree with this thread are bad ele players.

It used to be too weak, quite simply. And now it is the best. Uhm … what is it glass-cannon thieves use to say to me … oh yes: “Some one has to be the best”. Jokes aside: I hope they don’t revert it completely, but bring it back on par with the top-tier

Elementalist is the only class without a trait to decrease falling damage. Some things you have, some you don’t. Life isn’t fair and equal in all ways so all this complaining about a class with so few viable specs is ludicrous, considering I can go mesmer and thief (done that) and put random traits and own in sPvP.

I can see why it is the strongest, or one of the strongest out there. But if you view it in perspective there is a lot of unjustified whining out there as well.

1) While Mist Form technically resets health, you actually get downed penalty each time you use it. Mist Form away and you start with 50% HP and you health goes down much faster.
The OP makes it seem like MF is a surefire way to indefinitely keep in the fight, this is bull.

2) The OP assumes that in every other situation you always have access to a stability, teleport and/or 2 people for a stomp. In any case where you don’t the ele downed is actually not as powerful as the others.
As ele I have a 100% chance to avoid the first stomp. But if the opponent doesn’t have stability or a teleport, I can avoid getting stomped a lot more and a lot longer on many other classes.
Note that the cooldown on Vapor Form has been changed to 20 seconds, meaning that with the extra downed penalty (point #1) you won’t be able to use it a second time unless you can heal yourself up.

In the end though I agree that for tPvP this ability is on the ‘too strong’-side. Especially the fact you can force people away from a point is imo too strong.
But you really have to get some misconceptions and false assumptions out of the way if you want a fair debate over what to do with it. Even in tPvP you don’t always have access to stability for stomping or have 2 players around to stomp or a teleport, and in those cases the ele downed state is hardly the strongest.