Guild Wars 2

Hey guys

This is a duel between Intigo, who is a great D/D ele player and Osicat, the famous shatter mesmer. As you can see, these battles are before the nerfs. Both are very good players, they have mastered the class to an excellent level and they are very capable of killing both opponents. They also are very evened out.

Now tell me, if a mesmer can play like that against a clearly overpowered profession (/sarcasm). Why did they only nerf us so badly? If a mesmer if capable of doing that, aren’t they OP as well?

Not suggesting they are OP just simply stating that the nerfs were unreasonable. Especially the RTL nerf. Inb4 confusion nerf which barely hurt him.

Because Anet read the cries & “balance” around those rather then learning how to play the game themselves & find out it is all bullkitten.

FYI, Mesmer in that video runs no condition removal AT ALL (and I mean it – he only has Sigil of Generosity on staff for that)… So he would have a hard time with condition based guys, while that Ele has plenty of condi removals on top of what he has in that video.

So yeah, they both went 100% all in… The problem – Ele could do 120% of that, because he would also do just as good against condition spammers.

Other than that, I do think shatter specs could use a slight nerfbat in dueling and I say that as a Mesmer player.

I got up to 4 mins of the video until I got bored. At that point it takes anyone to see how the mesmer completely out play that d/d ele. Due to the various and constant heals this build has to get out of any possible tight 1v1 situation the ele can encounter, the mesmer can’t emphasize on bringing him down. Don’t be surprise when the heals from this build get nerf because I am certain, it will happen.

LightningBlaze.4913:

I got up to 4 mins of the video until I got bored. At that point it takes anyone to see how the mesmer completely out play that d/d ele. Due to the various and constant heals this build has to get out of any possible tight 1v1 situation the ele can encounter, the mesmer can’t emphasize on bringing him down. Don’t be surprise when the heals from this build get nerf because I am certain, it will happen.

That’s the thing an ele needs. He needs the heals to keep him alive. If he doesn’t have that, the damage needs to be stronger.

LightningBlaze.4913:

Due to the various and constant heals this build has to get out of any possible tight 1v1 situation the ele can encounter, the mesmer can’t emphasize on bringing him down.

Your bias is showing. Mesmers are just as if not harder to bring down because of their teleports, stealth and more frequent invulnerability. I’m sorry that a low hp and low armor profession that is always visible, can’t instantly displace itself with phase retreat (which can be used while stunned btw) every 6-10 seconds and doesn’t have an invul on a 10 second cooldown can heal and remove conditions very well. I’m sorry that when an ele allocates nearly every trait point and utility slot towards defense, they are allowed to make mistakes without exploding instantly.

Plus, the mesmer won at least once (I didn’t watch the whole thing). The mesmer interrupted ether renewal and it was over. Ether renewal did get nerfed because the inability to use it in mist form gives eles one less way to ensure it has full effect. The healing from healing ripple and similar traits is balanced in wvw where people are running around with 100+ crit damage.

I can’t seem to find anything above average. This ele plays bunker build and that allows him to take so much punishment it’s obviously why anet had to nerf eles. He randomly dodges, I think that during 30 minutes he dodged 1 illusionary leap. Make him scrimm with zerker or at least valk+zerker gear with 1 untraited cantrip against any decent shatter mesmer and he’s dead in 5 seconds after he burns that cantrip for 1st leap.

On the sidenote, why zvzers like to duel with tanky builds? I sometimes encounter 2 people dueling at the bottom of the map for few minutes without any noticeable winner. What’s the point of 1v1 with bunker specs? Your mistakes hardly matter.

Gaidax.7835:

FYI, Mesmer in that video runs no condition removal AT ALL (and I mean it – he only has Sigil of Generosity on staff for that)… So he would have a hard time with condition based guys, while that Ele has plenty of condi removals on top of what he has in that video.

So yeah, they both went 100% all in… The problem – Ele could do 120% of that, because he would also do just as good against condition spammers.

Other than that, I do think shatter specs could use a slight nerfbat in dueling and I say that as a Mesmer player.

This is precisely what I mention all the time. Eles were never OP.
This nerf just made us require even more planned execution of skills. For instance, don’t always use ether renewal and water attune at the same time. make sure the mes has dazed before running ether renewal or watch out for it when popping it.
Honestly, stupid kids just didn’t know what to do against us and it hurt us. I’ve personally thought the only class close to OP was a mesmer. But even then, not really.

Now, about their cond removal being inexistant. they truly don’t have much cond removal and osicat runs without e.g null field simply because he doesnt need it for an ele. If he was a thief, I’m sure he’d have traited for it or made use of it with “withdraw into shadows”
THIS IS HOW EVERYONE SHOULD PLAY. They should know what is necessary and what isn’t for an elementalist and any class they go up against.

The nerf doesn’t affect our gameplay so much. It just means we need to time things better but don’t nerf the most viable build we have on account of kitten kids that don’t know how to play and improve themselves. My advice to arenanet, leave the ele right here and buff up kittening conjures. This way, eles that KNOW HOW TO play and have spent honest time understanding their class can adjust or create better builds apart from ones that are so dependent on arcane and water traits.

This is exactly why I dislike “spectator mode” in spvp. Kids are just going to grab builds they like, forget about learning the mechanics of their class and in the long run end up screaming “OP OP!” when they havent learned to adjust to a kittening build.

Likewise, noob eles do the exact same thing. Its a shame. Arenanet needs to take a deeper look at that and stop nerfing and buffing here and there.

The RTL was the only nerf we’ve had that was anything close to being just. The rest were all pointless.
We need buffs not nerfs at this point or they will kill the class.

What they need to do is raise Ele’s base hp or put huge vitality buffs in the fire or air lines so it would be more viable to run bursty builds like Osi’s because right now a 10/30/0/0/30 build with zerker/knights puts an ele at like 12k hp with no healing and that’s just not gonna work very well with d/d but a mesmer can run a build like that and have like 18k hp and be quite effective defensively because of the classes’s access to stealth, clone generation and the active defenses on the staff and mainhand sword, not to mention portal which Osi makes good use of in these duels.

also from a deeper analysis of the match,
The ele seems to be geared for a bit more dps.
Possibly valk gear? but cleric jewels. The dodging isn’t great, and the might stacking is essentially inexistant.

Osicat would have done himself a favor by keeping the dps pressure on way more than he did in the first half of the video and much like how he did in the latter half.

The sheer amount of head scratching about the recent nerf to ELEs on this forum is mind blowing. You guys really are in denial.

Miserymachine.7512:

The sheer amount of head scratching about the recent nerf to ELEs on this forum is mind blowing. You guys really are in denial.

It’s not just the nerfs to mobility and healing that really bothers me it’s also the complete lack of significant buffs to other weapons/utilities leaving cantrips as still being the most useful utilities and leaving heavy speccing into water/arcana still pretty much mandatory. So we’re left with a clunkier d/d spec but not much in the way of more effective alternatives.

Miserymachine.7512:

The sheer amount of head scratching about the recent nerf to ELEs on this forum is mind blowing. You guys really are in denial.

The video is pre-patch, though. Not every ele in wvw wants to play 19k+hp specs, either.

I’d suggest people who still play D/D try doing 20 air for reduced time on air cooldowns (this turns a hit with RTL into a 16s cd on the next one), (you also shock people with a ranged bolt when swapping to air, keeping them in combat), and 20 water. You will still need evasive arcana for dodge healing/cleanse. Try heal on crit food aswell. If you’re a chef you can make 3 mixed berry pies at a time.

I’d be curious to see his (the Elementalist) gear breakdown. I have 2.8k armor, 16.5k health, 58% crit damage and 30% crit chance with 270 healing power and we end up hitting for about the same. Interesting. I crit a bit more than he does, and for higher, but I’m still curious.

haviz.1340:

I can’t seem to find anything above average. This ele plays bunker build and that allows him to take so much punishment it’s obviously why anet had to nerf eles. He randomly dodges, I think that during 30 minutes he dodged 1 illusionary leap. Make him scrimm with zerker or at least valk+zerker gear with 1 untraited cantrip against any decent shatter mesmer and he’s dead in 5 seconds after he burns that cantrip for 1st leap.

On the sidenote, why zvzers like to duel with tanky builds? I sometimes encounter 2 people dueling at the bottom of the map for few minutes without any noticeable winner. What’s the point of 1v1 with bunker specs? Your mistakes hardly matter.

Exactly! This is a very easy forgiving build for eles even now with mist form nerf. You can make all sort of mistakes and still be perfectly fine. Beginners become great with it but give them any other build and they get slaughter so easily. There’s no need to watch your opponent animation skills in order to know which one to dodge or observe their buffs or the conditions they put on you or using your surroundings towards your advantage, no skill at all to play this right.

Yep, that ele basically doesn’t react to his opponent’s moves, just using learnt rotation. I can’t justify calling him “great”, even “good”.

I can’t seem to find anything above average. This ele plays bunker build and that allows him to take so much punishment it’s obviously why anet had to nerf eles. He randomly dodges, I think that during 30 minutes he dodged 1 illusionary leap. Make him scrimm with zerker or at least valk+zerker gear with 1 untraited cantrip against any decent shatter mesmer and he’s dead in 5 seconds after he burns that cantrip for 1st leap.

On the sidenote, why zvzers like to duel with tanky builds? I sometimes encounter 2 people dueling at the bottom of the map for few minutes without any noticeable winner. What’s the point of 1v1 with bunker specs? Your mistakes hardly matter.

I can’t see how at equal level of skill, a zerker ele can compete against a zerker mesmer, all the ele attacks save arcane skills can be easily dodged without the need to use any defensive skills, a mesmer can simply zip out of any snare/kd attempt from the ele.

In a duel with no element of surprise, a full zerker ele got no chance, sorry but when even top 50 players play valkyrie amulet…I won’t be able to take seriously anybody suggesting that an ele can use zerker amulet and be competetive at high level of play.

Assuming the ele is using double arcana, once you survive the initial burst if caught…you can dodge the rest blindfolded.

To land phoenix reliably an ele must be at mele range where dodging an illusionary leap is basically impossible, the shatter build is anti-mele by definition and nobody can tell me that landing a mesmer burst is more difficult than an ele burst.

The mesmer may not have the healing of an ele, but he possess far superior survivability thx to in-built defensive skills, I’m not trying to justify extreme bunkerinh..but at the very least people should stop with staff like zerker ele….playing against top 50 players let you realize how predictable is the ele and any burst attempt by an ele only works if the enemy is distracted or simply a bad player

People should watch the stream of top team using “burst” ele, they’ve got somebody to babysit them 24/7 and all they do is join an already started battle or assault a point only to receive help a second later …maybe to ress them.
Again I don’t like extreme bunkering and don’t use it, but I hate to babysitted for all match and trying to play an ele like a thief

It wasn’t the point. The point was that ele wasn’t dodging any burst, just healing up thanks to survivability from triple cantrips and tanky spec. I only know one person who’s been using zerk+valk gear as ele in pvp but he plays with triple cantrips. Everyone else -just valk+zerk. Do you think you could win against evenly skilled shatter mesmer without dodging any of his burst?

You talk like to dodge a mesmer burst is an easy feat for a d/d ele, you need to stay at mele range to land any burst and your main burst skill need to be manually aimed on the contrary of any mesmer skill, if you don’t take the correct distance you simply sprint past the target dealing no dmg, and the mesmer can simply use its 10s CD invulnerability, phase retreat from any KD/stun while dealing aoe dmg that doesn’t need the target to sit 5s in it ( like staff)

In the video ,@intigo was able to land every single burning speed and that again a mesmer who spamm phase retreat, chaos field and armor, blink, decoy and more…it’s already a feat.

To land any hits the ele needs to go through a barrage of clones, chaos field and stealth/invulnerability skills, the mesmer can keep himself at safe distance while the illusions/clones do the job.

But really..do you see any mele player constantly able to dodge illusionary leap?
I see only warriors and d/d eles forced in playing cat and mouse with the slippery mesmer, the warrior get killed easily but mesmer players say is UP, ele can somehow land some hits on the mesmer by going tanky/healing specc…but mesmer players say ele is OP.

The warrior is your example of zerker mele without the ele condition removal and healing, but he’s got 8k more HP…still the warrior die 1v1 to the mesmer; now you expect the ele to use the same set up while having less and more predictable damage and less base HP….c’mon

Maybe you can show me how you dodge an illusionary leap at 200-300 range while you try to frantically reach the mesmer who’s hiding behind his clones, laughing at you

The only thing I saw in that video was depression that anet nerfed our mobility rather than our heals…

You can try observing his status bar, it helps when they use swap almost immediately after leap.

Next time I’ll try to observe his status bar 24/7 to watch the leap come in instead of actually seeing where he’s positioned to land my burning speed and other skills. Thanks for the tip.

He also dodges a lot, sometimes with no point just to get positioning better. Since eles have perma vigor, access to dodges generally isn’t a problem.

His gear is afaik PVT with more damage oriented trinkets. Mostly ascended berserker stuff.

a good shatter zerk mesmer has always had the advantage against dd ele’s, simply due to the nature of how shatters work.

this doesn’t mean mesmers are op or ele’s are up. you can’t balance around 1v1’s.

plus phantasm mesmers dominate even more in 1v1’s, but relatively worthless in any other aspect of the game.

vinceftw.5086:

Next time I’ll try to observe his status bar 24/7 to watch the leap come in instead of actually seeing where he’s positioned to land my burning speed and other skills. Thanks for the tip.

No need to be sarcastic, human brain can process a lot of things simultaneously. You could also watch his animations but since the enemy is asura I didn’t mention it.

that was kinda slow and boring 1v1 and if you think mez isn’t getting nerfed every patch you should look at patch notes. Engi/mez is all that receives nerfs

Nuka Cola.8520:

that was kinda slow and boring 1v1 and if you think mez isn’t getting nerfed every patch you should look at patch notes. Engi/mez is all that receives nerfs

I have a mesmer too and most of the nerfs were bugs that made you unstoppable. Multiple shatters on the same clones? Might stacking through the roof because of bugs? Those are well deserved nerfs. My mesmer can still do what I could when I first created it. Confusion got nerfed which is one build of the mesmer while they still ahve at least 3-4 others that are great. Mesmer is THE most viable class for pvp-play, don’t come crying to me about mesmers.

I agree with engis though, they really need some love.

OMG this elementalist has incredible level of skill. To go through all these illusions, invisibility and teleports with insane range. And with broken dagger attacks which miss half the time.
For those noobs who tell he uses dodges randomly: elementalist has 4 spells attached to dodge and their effect clearly seen on ground.

The main problem with this duel is that a duel-specced mesmer is probably the most powerful dueling class in the game. It’s one downside is that it can’t catch people who decide to run away. So any class can just run away, heal to reset the fight, then try again. The only time someone gets downed is if he messes up or gets hit by a string of lucky crits. That’s why these videos aren’t particularly interesting and why it feels like players aren’t punished for making mistakes.

And I just had to respond to this post:

This is a very easy forgiving build for eles even now with mist form nerf. You can make all sort of mistakes and still be perfectly fine. Beginners become great with it but give them any other build and they get slaughter so easily.

You are commenting on bunker builds in general. The whole point of a bunker build is being able to withstand burst without dying. If you think elementalists are unique in being able to bunker, then you don’t know this game very well. A beginner running just about any bunker build can survive despite constantly making mistakes. For example, look at this Mesmer’s tpvp bunker build: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNmDSDYOR54 .

I’m sure the player is actually very good, but to showcase his build’s potential, he doesn’t bother dodging. He sits there and eats multiple 100b bursts and still manages to survive.

In short, it’s super easy to survive 1v1 as any class if you play a bunker build. The “skill” involved in 1v1ing with a bunker build is managing to keep enough pressure on your opponent to down him in a reasonable amount of time. It’s easiest to do this with ranger and mesmer because pets and phantasms do strong damage and require little to no management. If you want to down someone as a bunker ele, you need to consistently land burning speed + firegrab whenever they’re off cooldown, and both of these are skillshots.

LightningBlaze.4913:

There’s no need to watch your opponent animation skills in order to know which one to dodge or observe their buffs or the conditions they put on you or using your surroundings towards your advantage, no skill at all to play this right.

This again seems like an issue with you not knowing the game well enough to be able to spot the skill involved playing a d/d ele. You need to spot animations to interrupt/dodge just as much as any other class. Just because you can heal more doesn’t mean that you no longer need to worry about being hit. Time spent healing is time that you’re not pressuring your opponent.

vinceftw.5086:

Hey guys

This is a duel between Intigo, who is a great D/D ele player and Osicat, the famous shatter mesmer. As you can see, these battles are before the nerfs. Both are very good players, they have mastered the class to an excellent level and they are very capable of killing both opponents. They also are very evened out.

Now tell me, if a mesmer can play like that against a clearly overpowered profession (/sarcasm). Why did they only nerf us so badly? If a mesmer if capable of doing that, aren’t they OP as well?

Not suggesting they are OP just simply stating that the nerfs were unreasonable. Especially the RTL nerf. Inb4 confusion nerf which barely hurt him.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Anet does not care about the elementalist class as anything else than a support class. Their latest nerf strongly limited our capacity to spend points in damage traits and forced most of us to divert about 15-25% of our damage output into vitality and healing. We are so underpowered now the elementalist class is by far the most difficult to play and less rewarding, and everyone knows and laugh about it.