Guild Wars 2

Bashing elite specs has been the hip thing to do since HoT, so I figure it’d be a nice change of pace to talk about the good things elite specs did for the game.

Warrior
-HoT allowed warriors to run something other than greatsword. Condi warrior is actually a thing now, rather than the pre-hot days of power-or-bust
-Berserk mode added fluidity to the class. Core warrior felt extremely clunky to use and was rotationally simplistic. Berserk mode made it a bit more interesting to play.

Guardian
-Virtues are used actively now. Core virtues where so weak that player typically camped the passive rather than active use. Virtues only saw active use if the guardian had no other options, and even then only if the virtues where traited.

Rangers
-Rangers are actually useful now. Pre-Hot rangers where extremely meh.

Thief
-Daredevil gives thieves defensive options other than stealth.
-Staff offers a viable alternative to dagger/x

Necromancer
-Reapers shroud internally synergizes with itself. Compare this to core shroud where the skills often worked against each other. Core shroud skills 1,4, and 5 are ranged, yet shroud 2 is a gap closer. Still have no idea what the devs where trying to accomplish with core shroud #5.
-Shout elite. Necromancers finally get a low CD elite, and it’s not a transform! CttB offers a elite that is good for both power and condi builds, and can be used to set up plays.

Engineer
-Scrapper offers a nice break from kits for those of us who don’t like frantic button mashing.

I’m leaving out Mesmer and Ele because I don’t play those.

2 equally skilled thiefs no matter how bad or good skilled they are, the D/P will always wreck the w/e else weapon set thief.

why? because all other weapon sets are either to slow or have been hit so hard by thief nerfs cus of weapon set D/P which has been toned down to “normal” while rest of weapon sets have been toned down to “useless”

this is also quite obvious cus beside condition thiefs every thief runs D/P if they need to play serious.

Crinn.7864:

Bashing elite specs has been the hip thing to do since HoT, so I figure it’d be a nice change of pace to talk about the good things elite specs did for the game.

Warrior
-HoT allowed warriors to run something other than greatsword. Condi warrior is actually a thing now, rather than the pre-hot days of power-or-bust
-Berserk mode added fluidity to the class. Core warrior felt extremely clunky to use and was rotationally simplistic. Berserk mode made it a bit more interesting to play.

Guardian
-Virtues are used actively now. Core virtues where so weak that player typically camped the passive rather than active use. Virtues only saw active use if the guardian had no other options, and even then only if the virtues where traited.

Rangers
-Rangers are actually useful now. Pre-Hot rangers where extremely meh.

Thief
-Daredevil gives thieves defensive options other than stealth.
-Staff offers a viable alternative to dagger/x

Necromancer
-Reapers shroud internally synergizes with itself. Compare this to core shroud where the skills often worked against each other. Core shroud skills 1,4, and 5 are ranged, yet shroud 2 is a gap closer. Still have no idea what the devs where trying to accomplish with core shroud #5.
-Shout elite. Necromancers finally get a low CD elite, and it’s not a transform! CttB offers a elite that is good for both power and condi builds, and can be used to set up plays.

Engineer
-Scrapper offers a nice break from kits for those of us who don’t like frantic button mashing.

I’m leaving out Mesmer and Ele because I don’t play those.

interesting i would like to point out that warrior pre-hot use to play alot of sword shield or sword war horn with long bow. With mace shield or hammer with Great sword.

Im really not sure how you can say warrior can use other weapons other then Great sword when most people pre hot were using other weapons then great sword.

Also i would like to point out the other things you are mentioning are quality of life upgrades. If every class spec is better then core specs then obviously DH F1-F3 skills will be more useful as well as necros shroud skills.

Lastly, your comment on rangers says alot. Rangers were useful pre hot. Ranger and necro simply required more skill and had just as high as a upside as other classes. This comment alone brings the question of what is the point of this post?

You forgot to mention Anet gutted acro and s/d so they can resell them as elite spec. So no, at least for thieves it didn’t really bring anything. It is like breaking someone legs and then sell them an artificial leg. This is literary what Anet did with thieves in HoT.

Your analysis is partly true. Overall the good and bad of elite specs are clear:

• some of them DO provide different playstyle which were unviable with the core class (condi warrior, support ranger, etc…) which is great
• a large part of their new skills/traits have better design and are more fluid than core skills, with overall less “garbage skills”
  BUT
• many of the new skills/traits give a more spammy playstyle: you can now spam burst skills, spam shatters (endless shatter fodder), spam traps, spam dodges, spam AOE CC, etc…
• the clear superiority of elite specs over core specs means that the old playstyles are not relevant anymore (support guardian, support warrior, burst mesmer, power ranger) and you are forced to play in the playstyle that the elite spec provide. So there is no neat diversity gain.

At the end, not all is negative. And a big part is that elite specs were designed after the successes/failures of the core class were known and identified. Many of the mechanics designed at launch did not work as expected, and in general, the game has moved a long way. Core classes have not had the rework they needed and many things are simply obsolete. Elite specs correct that to a large extent which is part of the reasons for their superiority. I wish a-net would focus some time and energy on a rework and have again the level of interaction we had during the HoT beta week-ends, simply because the bad core designs can not all be fixed at the elite level.

Sword + longbow condi warrior was a thing for a while, and is arguably one of the most effective build at that time since you can pump out quick bleed stacks and good burn stacks against foes that doesn’t have accessible condi cleanses at that time.

Now warrior just have every effective condi slap into one skill…on one weapon that doesn’t do condi damage outside of primal burst.

As for mesmer and ele…

Mesmer got a new bunker role back in S1, which is then pretty much removed. Not much change is done on power shatter’s playstyle but condi more popular following it (note its already popular with trait rework, they even have to “hotfix” MtD). Interrupt mesmer is effectively deleted since HoT due to stability/stun break access to all professions, so I’m not sure I like the tradeoff.

HoT does turn ele into the most effective healbot in GW2 though, back then D/D was more of a bruiser and only have a handful of skills that can heal teammates. Other than that overload definitely posed a harm to ele’s old playstyle, since the longer CD and overload channel time work against ele’s skill alterations. You may argue its a completely different playstyle, and that its easier for people to get into ele now that overload contains so much reward in one skill. But overall it doesn’t provide a viable playstyle outside of healbot. DPS ele (regardless of weapons) is still food for majority of professions, and bruiser build diminishes when celestial ammy is gone.

So in other words, Elite specs attempted to hide the flaws of core specs. Totally a good thing!

Yeah, elitespecs made the game more fun to play. /s

Warr was not simplistic back then,we had to slowly gain adren before we could start bursting.Now its headbut,burst burst swap burst burst..It’s way more simplistic to my feeling.We also rely way too much on our regens and invulns,ep stacking to 8 sec is also..simplistic.

I never saw a single warrior in sPvP that ran greatsword, so I have no idea where you got that from.

The difference between a good and a bad guardian was often their use of virtues. A well timed block could save his team from death or deny huge bursts. They were never useless, just not as strong as today.

Thief got gutted. There’s only one way to play thief now, and that is daredevil. As others have mentioned: they cut off our feet and sold us prosthetics back.

The reason I hate elite specs are because they are mandatory if you want to play any part of this game above average. That is bad design and a lousy way for ANet to push HoT.

Prior to the Elite specs, Mesmer was pretty much reliant on Deceptive Evasions in the Dueling line to be viable.

Thanks to the Chronomancer Elite and HOT, thats all changed. Deceptive Evasions is no longer a requirement.

Now all Mesmer needs is Illusionary Reversion, Chronophantasma, Restorative Illusions, Mental Defense and Maim The DisIllusioned to be viable.

Thanks HOT!!!!!!

my opinion @ classes

@ Warrior: after fixing the bugs: the warriors looses his biggest weaknes, he has a larger range to wave about, so he can finnaly hit something and he smash much more the f1 button then before. 10/10

@ Guardian: finally a good suround line and skills. oh yea ofc he is a good noob-shredder. 10/10

@ Rev: we don´t now him without that spec. 10/10

@ ranger: after fixing his op heal, he got good unique stuff, still pitty that 50% of dmg depence on your pet. 9/10

@ thief: liddle too less suroundbility but it makes him the strongest on his role 8/10

@ Engeeeee: got a good line, but 3/6 of the other lines + over 50% of theyr skills need an update, maybe they can use it for him so the engeneer can finally hit something, that don´t stay on one place? 5/10

@ mesmer: a liddle too strong, but still fine. The defence buff was needed! 10,5/10

@necro: its a dps monster + he can corrupt, so bye bye 33% less dmg, or cc protection. ohh yea and gs doesnt hit as good as the other weapons so 8/10

@ele: Too big casttime on overload, so 1 mechanik that never works…. but its fine anet will fix it.
the horn is weaker then the fokus, cause of the immortal. If they give the horn a evade for 1-2 sec in a small cd (eg.15 sec) it coud be a select able choise, especially with that much cc´s.
8/10

at all good balanced, but i wish the ele and the engeneer a big revision update on weapons, some skills and some traitlines. just some small skills need nerfs (like staff 5 on rev.) And at all it woud be nice to rechange some traits to make a choise harder (like warrior Burst Mastery as pasive so there can finaly be a choise to the other 2 traits).

Crinn.7864:

Warrior
-HoT allowed warriors to run something other than greatsword. Condi warrior is actually a thing now, rather than the pre-hot days of power-or-bust
-Berserk mode added fluidity to the class. Core warrior felt extremely clunky to use and was rotationally simplistic. Berserk mode made it a bit more interesting to play.

Hambow ? Shoutbow ? The 2 builds that put warrior on top of the meta didn’t use a greatsword.

And berserk doesn’t add fluidity to the class, it litterally does the opposite.

Elite specs and HoT in general made me discover Overwatch and I’m having a blast! Ty Anet!

Yes warrior had non-greatsword builds at a few points, but they where the exception not the rule. They also tended to be short lived.

Warrior pre-hot was chained to being power, and since GS is easily the strongest power weapon it got picked more or less all the time.

Crinn.7864:

Yes warrior had non-greatsword builds at a few points, but they where the exception not the rule. They also tended to be short lived.

Warrior pre-hot was chained to being power, and since GS is easily the strongest power weapon it got picked more or less all the time.

GS was the best power weapon but because there was set up and actual give and take it it wasnt necessarily the main weapon.

For instance mace/shield was better for 1 vs 1 yet hammer was the meta for team fights.

Also shout bow was warriors best build, its why you saw the Pro team switch to it more then the rampage build.

Lastly all the builds still worked, if you wanted to play hambow you could of, it just wasnt as strong. If you wanted to play condi, you could. I use to play a carrion rifle/hammer build all the time and people who didnt have stability would lose to it all the time.

Which brings us to the HOT issue, Pre HOT there was give and take before the d/d ele craze. You could do certain things depending on the traits and specs you used. Not once singular spec line made you strong.

Now druid form is stun break-condi removal- insane team heal abilities.

Dare devil increased dps in melee range-condi removal on dodge- dodge now has a ability

beserk form for warrior does more damage then any core dps build- going into beserk form breaks stun and removes condi- increased damage/boons for going into beserk mode/ more damage or stability in beserk mode.

This is not a good thing. Elite specs are broken and they destroyed build diversity. If you were a really good player you could play what ever you wanted and win fights. Now if you wanted to run a all signet warrior and i run some meta druid build. I will destroy you simply because the spec is so much better.

“The thing elite specs did”

The good things that elite specs did was address problems in core classes (at least in mesmer case, don’t have any other elite specs on my account). The bad, besides being a tad overpowered, is that these problems in the core class design were not fixed at the core level. Which means that with the next elite spec it will either have to fix the same exact problems again (which would be redundant and have a large chance of not making it unique), or we will have to live with those core problems.

I mean come on. Illusionary reversion and Chronophantasma were basically ANets admission that mesmer’s class mechanic is self defeating……… Its great that we got them. But bad that they are tied to an elite spec

Original poster is pretty clueless. A lot of what he lists is what makes elite specs brain-dead OP. Ya, if you give defense or synergy to a profession where it was previously lacking without adding a different weakness, of course it’s better – and extremely overpowered.

• Warrior had a ton of builds prior to HoT. All were mostly balanced and pretty viable. The shifts came about due to ANet nerf/buffs than meta changes. You had axe+sh/GS originally then hambow, sw+?/longbow, longbow/GS, GS/mace+sh, etc. The sw+?/longbow builds were typically condition damage.
• Guardian virtue actives were used a lot even before HoT when traited with on-use effects. But the visual effect didn’t have a huge graphic so maybe you didn’t notice. F1 had on-demand blind. F2 had 3x condi clear. F3 is a clutch block and protection to all allies and often better than waiting for it to refresh.
• Rangers were decent before HoT, but needed a good player in order to perform. Someone who could do more than LB 4, LB 2. The main problem is that spirits got nerfed to the ground, traps mostly sucked, and shouts sucked back then too; you didn’t really have any good utilities.
• Necromancer normal death shroud is fine except the #2 could be better. Apparently it was a targeted teleport earlier in development, but was changed. The #5 applies torment and immobilize after time, which is pretty good.
• Scrapper still uses elixir gun heavily. Engineer will never get away from using at least one kit due to its design and the versatility of kits compared to other abilities.

Personally the most important thing Chrono offers is the passive 25% movement speed trait, allowing use of runes other than traveler and so on.

And yea both IR sand Cp are attempts to fix the anti-synergy of phantasms and shattering and to reduce reliance on DE – but now we’ve become reliant on these two traits instead!

Add in other things like superspeed illusions on shatter and the entire line is fixing holes in core mesmer – instead of being an alternative to core mesmer…