Guild Wars 2

D/D bunker is going to be nerfed. 59:40
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2guru/b/365009593

Uh… I lack speakers… would someone be kind enough to sum up what he said? lol

I can’t get it to work either. Please elaborate on what was said?

Basically this :

1) Bunkers will be nerfed
2) Eles do have weak weapons/builds and they will look at them
3) Ele healing skills will be nerfed

Erm, don’t Elementalists have the weakest healing skills in the game? Granted I only play a staff, but geyser and healing rain don’t seem that powerful nor does my self-heal skill which heals for like 1/6th of my total health even with 30 points in water magic.

Don’t really have much experience with bunkers so I’m guessing most of it has to do with them, and I hope the the staff gets some nice adjustments to make it less crowd-reliant and give us a little more strength for single targets.

Edit: And for the love of kittens please make air much better for the staff. I use it the least out of all the elements and usually only for the speed boost skill. For single-target damage and crowd control specialty its pretty freakin useless.

Any timetable for this given? I just hit 80 today and was about to unload a bunch of gold/karma on exotic gear for WvW. If they’re re-working it I might as well play a different game until they do and save my efforts.

Also I think Arheundel may mean the Ele’s ability to self-heal? The heal x amount per spell cast is what makes bunker such a powerful build.

@justin when you consider that most classes don’t have any heals except their heal skill and a couple traits eles got it pretty good with their heals. geyser and healing rain both are water fields so any blast finishers you put into them will heal for around 1.3k w/o anything in healing power so that even more healing. on daggers with the signet of restoration i rarely bother with activating it, between the heal from attuning to water (healing ripple), soothing mist being up 90% of the time, cone of cold healing for close to 1k health on a 10 second cooldown, and if i’m really in a pinch healing wave for another 1.9k.

on staff i usually use the glyph to heal and it heals for over a third of my health not counting the regen if i was using it in water.

tl;dr
it’s not that the ele’s heals are strong, it’s that there are so MANY of them

Hold up a sec. First off that entire talk (or nearly the entirety of it) is about spvp. So don’t jump to conclusions all willy nilly. Second thing is where the heal nerf hits many mean less in the over scope of things. A nerf to our mobility would be much worse over all.

I didn’t really take that away from the SOTG at all.

They talked about ele being a case of having a bunch of little things that add up to being OP, but that they wanted to tweak ele (specifically D/D) down a little, but without playing whack-a-mole.

They talked about wanting to let the meta develop counters to things instead of just smashing them with the nerf hammer only to have the meta change and suddenly what was OP is now useless. One of the ideas they were pushing was bringing up other builds that are weak and making them essentially counter builds to the ele.

There are likely to be some nerfs, but I didn’t get the feeling that they were about to destroy anything like they did with evasive arcana.

I liked what the devs had to say for the most part. The problem is that they’re only talking to tPvP players who see everything through their gun fight in a hallway meta. They whine about things being OP that are weak anywhere outside of a shoe box. These SOTG talks really need to include people from WvW who have a better handle on how classes interact in a more complex environment than a 12’ radius circle.

Caffynated.5713:

I didn’t really take that away from the SOTG at all.

They talked about ele being a case of having a bunch of little things that add up to being OP, but that they wanted to tweak ele (specifically D/D) down a little, but without playing whack-a-mole.

They talked about wanting to let the meta develop counters to things instead of just smashing them with the nerf hammer only to have the meta change and suddenly what was OP is now useless. One of the ideas they were pushing was bringing up other builds that are weak and making them essentially counter builds to the ele.

There are likely to be some nerfs, but I didn’t get the feeling that they were about to destroy anything like they did with evasive arcana.

I liked what the devs had to say for the most part. The problem is that they’re only talking to tPvP players who see everything through their gun fight in a hallway meta. They whine about things being OP that are weak anywhere outside of a shoe box. These SOTG talks really need to include people from WvW who have a better handle on how classes interact in a more complex environment than a 12’ radius circle.

Exactly…as long as they balance the game like that…I prefer to switch profession.

Know this guys, the elementalist went this same route way back in GW1, he was nerfed to the ground becuase people where QQ all over the place, better to switch to another profession now rather than being forced in shelving your ele for the next couple of years while waiting for the obvious “overbuff patch”

Well, super. I was really enjoying my Elementalist too.

Caffynated.5713:

WvW who have a better handle on how classes interact in a more complex environment than a 12’ radius circle.

I agree. I was listening and was dissapppointed with the overall scope of the discussion (it hints of pvp elitism). I am in WvW (on thief these days no backstab, pw, pd, or ldb lol) and I see more players there than I ever do In spvp. I get it spvp is hella important and I tourney from time to time too but when I spend a couple hours doing runs in AC for cash for WvW; I realize I put in double time just to be competitive there. I get spvp and all and mastering the craft but kitten we actually have to grind for it.

Also if anyone’s interested look at the 51:40 mark. It will give you a good idea that this talk was about spvp. I don’t know what changes they plan for us in WvW but they cant reflect Spvp too much is already nerfed there, and not just for us but for most other classes as well.

I feel like it is a very valid point that the sheer amount of space involved in sPvP vs WvW seems to effect the elementalist balance more significantly than any of the other classes I’ve tried. With the class based around doing lots of little things to an area, if there is significantly more space to spread out into (WvW) then that class is not as dangerous as when space is limited and AoE can be stacked (PvP). While I agree that the Ele should be looked at to make other builds more viable and bunker less-omni, I would definitely advocate discretion on dev’s part to listen to heavily to either group of competitive gamers.

Perhaps a compromise could be in order within the power itself? I’m not a programmer, but what if there was a factor of how effective an ability is that is relative to the terrain itself? Perhaps in wide areas ele spells are 120% larger, or deal 120% more damage then currently, while in small and enclosed areas they are 80% of current? This would also effect the play-ability of ele PvE and in dungeons ofc but I think it could fix many of the problems therein as well.

If there’s any dev reading this, you will break Elementalists if you nerf both the healing and bunker builds.

The healing has a lower CD than other professions because we’re the lowest health/armor, so (at least I) heal ALOT. And even with it’s short cooldowns I’m still lacking health.
Well, anything that hits me, hurt. A lot.

If you nerf the healing, non-bunker builds (such as mine) will suffer greatly since I’ll just become even squishier.
Will I be forced to go bunker (although it’ll be nerfed) just to have the minimum survivability required to PvP?

At least I have yet another reason to never enter sPvP, only to enter mists for free travel…

Meh, nerf first, break later.

Hopefully they don’t nerf PvE builds (psst make WvW non PvE related and have its own needs/buffs) as by now, they should know that eles are really weak in PvE related content ESPECIALLY dungeons, a slight glance at an ele will have you killed instantly…

Btw…Vapour form sucks after the fix, enter sPvP accidently…and they want it to be nerfed…. wat.

This is just like the AoE nerf we got in the January patch.

well thats cool. So elementalists have about 2 viable builds (glasscannon, bunker) and one of those is too good so we’ll only have a mediocre bunker and glasscannon left? good job devs. Hey here’s an idea..why not just write elementalists out of the game entirely? I mean if you don’t want anyone to seriously think about creating one, just remove it from the character creation screen. That would make your job way easier!

Interesting, though no matter what happens I’ll never stop playing my ele and engi, the attunement/kit switching playstyle is just too much fun, even if it gets nerfed :p

MagusShade.2358:

well thats cool. So elementalists have about 2 viable builds (glasscannon, bunker) and one of those is too good so we’ll only have a mediocre bunker and glasscannon left? good job devs. Hey here’s an idea..why not just write elementalists out of the game entirely? I mean if you don’t want anyone to seriously think about creating one, just remove it from the character creation screen. That would make your job way easier!

If you watched, or read what some folks have said, the devs want to make the ele’s other build more viable. Not leave us with mediocre builds.

Too much “the sky is falling” mentality.

To put it simply, as stated previously, the SOTG discussion was very s/tPvP related. Coming from that, the question is field “What are you aiming to nerf?” The main theme was that the ele (particularly d/d bunker) has so many little things that come together to make them a little bit more efficient then they should be. That was basically it. He lists off boon duration, toughness, regen, mobility, etc.

Who is going to argue that that isn’t a relatively realistic perspective? It’s easy enough to see/experience. It comes down to a fundamental question of is it because they are better than they should be, or that other classes can’t counter them efficiently enough? Are they too strong, or are the rest too weak? There’s an ambiguous standard in play that requires definition for their to be balance, a standard that can only be truly explored and adjusted via real world application. Remember, the ele was brought up along with the ranger.

This sort of standard of balance is pliable to the circumstances of play. That is to say, balance in sPvP =/= PvE =/= WvW. If one fails to distinguish the circumstance and make appropriate adjustments, the system, the game, fails. In that sense, we as players cannot take this as a blanket remark, and must hope that the developers are able to make this distinction.

Again, this position from anet on this matter is ambiguous at best. Prior to the ele nerf statements in the video the dev was basically saying that they don’t want to destroy builds like the ranger and ele, just make them a little less efficient in some regards, and bring other classes up and give them option to counter, etc, and that they are being very careful with what they do in these regards. We can only hope there is some truth behind that.

Zen.1965:

-snip-

“sky is falling” mentality?..the hell..

What are we supposed to do with perma stealth thieves popping out of nowhere and dealing 20k dmg in 1.5s? What about macro mesmers that deal 14k aoe dmg with press of a button and every 15s?
Shall we go all glass cannon and try to hit with dragon’s tooth :perma stealth thieves, phase retreat/stealth mesmer ( or any other player with an IQ above 80)?
During those 4s landing that you need to wait to (hopefully) hit the thief, you’ll get killed 100 times over XD, so sorry if eles are forced to go attrition way as our skills animations are ridicolous , with such obvious and easy to dodge skills you can’t really go burst ele, furthermore in the end of the day you still deal far less dmg than thieves.

So pls unless you play an ele attrition/sustain what else can you play? Glass cannon staff that die the second somebody looks your way or even sniff in your direction?…no ty

I like how they said the only effective ele builds were high skill cap, and they were going to improve the low skill ele builds.

That’d remove so much whining. Backstab thief-like ele? interesting.

This is what Anet consider a “buff” to eles:

-Water blast= base dmg increased from 200 to 260
Then followed by the same old bullkitten:" we feel that with the recent changes to staff, more builds diversity has been created"

And this what Anet consider “reasonable” nerfs:
-Fire grab= base dmg reduced from 2000 to 1600 and crit dmg reduced from 100% to 40%, CD increased from 30s CD to 45s CD
Then followed once again by the same bullkitten :" these changes were necessary to bring ele burst mroe in line with other profession burst".
Because of course a burst skill available every 45s for 5k dmg on glass cannon ele is equal to backstab build and mind wrack mesmer or even quickness short bow rangers …

aw they found out
me as a D/D healer specced ele am able to keep 4 glass cannons on full health in any dungeon thanks to all the healing I do… Good thing I started making a guardian

@ Arheundel:

Yes, “sky is falling” mentality. There are some wild speculations and conclusions being drawn in this thread. Switching to a different profession, etc? Over the comments in this video? Come on now…

There’s this whole sense of this being a house of cards and if someone sneezes in our direction it’s going to bring it all falling down because, well, WTF ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? If you do this… well, how can I play the class anymore!? Etc. When faced with the ever intimidating nerf bat, every class can be made out to be a house of cards.

I emphasized in my last post the importance of circumstance. You seemed to have offered up a lot of “in a vacuum” retorts. I’m not going to argue that thief burst dmg and stealth abuse builds are strong (I have a lv80 thief, I know), and I’m not going to argue that mesmer shatter builds don’t hurt, or that mesmer survival builds aren’t a serious kitten to kill. I know.

I also main a lvl 80, 0/10/0/30/30 d/d ele. I know why it’s my main, I know why I enjoy the class, I know why there is reference to skill cap, etc, when regarding the class. I also don’t want to see my class nerfed into oblivion. I’ve also dabbled with bunker staff and GC staff. Knowing these things, I can’t argue the efficiency of the ele vs other classes. Not necessarily “in a vacuum” or 1v1 situations or so many other circumstances we can consider. But in WvW, yeah I can see it being a bit “too efficient.” I can see why there would be attention drawn here, I don’t feel I need to explain why.

There just seems to be a fearmongering going on when it comes to these nerfs, like people realize their build has aspects that may be out of balance but covet them as they give them increased proficiency, and as such defend them rabidly. I personally found no reason to be alarmed after hearing what was said in the video. I also see no reason to be so scared about upcoming nerfs as they’ve been explained thus far. This however doesn’t exclude the fact that I’m skeptical for Anet to, lets say, stay “true” to their expressed position.

More likely, they will buff base healing and reduce scaling. Thus offensive build will benefit and bunker build will suffer. Probably increase CD of certain D/D skills and minor CD reduction in Focus. If they nerf scaling of Cleansing Wave (Dagger water 5), it will, 1 stone 2 birds because it is an indirect neft to Evasive Arcana. Might be reduce the passive healing of Signet of Restoration and increase the CD of active.

I for one welcome these nerfs.

Maybe they boost our con dmg and we can play S/F or S/D and spam earth 1 whole time. Need to save karma so i can buy con dmg, prec, tough gear.

As they say, eles have many small things that overall, used well, makes it rather strong.

Concerning builds, I am interested in seeing focus, scepter and staff being more versatile. As they also mentioned, they don’t like to play whack-a-mole. If other options were more viable/effective, it would reduce a onesided play strategy.

I still do believe that there is a problem with the ele, meaning that you can’t take the pure offensive route and be somewhat successful. Having little opportunity to play a pure offensive role, with squishiness that outshines all professions, you get little from it. There is no invisibility or some similar sort of option to fall back on if things fail for you, having the least amount of HP and armor in the game. That is what concerns me. RTL is only for dagger off-hand, and even with that, you won’t do much good for your team playing the pure offensive role.

They talk about traits, makes things better, and hopefully they will adjust matters and make traits more appealing for burst specializations, without giving bunker variations too much power.

Can we get a total remake of Fire Shield? Lamest aura EVER.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Can we get a total remake of Fire Shield? Lamest aura EVER.

It would be better if it was essentially retaliation. Fire Aura isn’t that useful on an ele because we’re generally putting a lot of burning on people already and it generally gets cleansed before the few seconds from Fire Aura make any difference.

Right now it exists to proc air I and earth V.

I will welcome the nerfs to bunker 0/10/0/30/30 d/d cantrip specs as long as other weapon sets, other utilities and other traitlines are improved.

2) Eles do have weak weapons/builds and they will look at them

this makes me happy

Gallrvaghn.4921:

I will welcome the nerfs to bunker 0/10/0/30/30 d/d cantrip specs as long as other weapon sets, other utilities and other traitlines are improved.

cantrip build is 10/10/0/30/20

actually….

And i feel they will destroy ele in PvE unless they limit the change to PvP
I think we have bad experience of anet balancing….

Alilinke.7690:

2) Eles do have weak weapons/builds and they will look at them

this makes me happy

They mean: “We will nerf now, and think of weak weapons/builds in a few years”

LordByron.8369:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

I will welcome the nerfs to bunker 0/10/0/30/30 d/d cantrip specs as long as other weapon sets, other utilities and other traitlines are improved.

cantrip build is 10/10/0/30/20

actually….

And i feel they will destroy ele in PvE unless they limit the change to PvP
I think we have bad experience of anet balancing….

you’re missing my point. -.-

maddoctor.2738:

Alilinke.7690:

2) Eles do have weak weapons/builds and they will look at them

this makes me happy

They mean: “We will nerf now, and think of weak weapons/builds in a few years”

That’s exactly 7 years time in Anet terms if we look at GW1 balance

If the devs have three brain cells, they will swap the regen on soothing disruption to something else.

it nerfs 30 water cantrip builds of the following:

- no more access to regen outside of water attunement
- 3 fewer condition removals.

it’s a small tweak that will make a world of difference where it matters without gutting elementalist group utility.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

LordByron.8369:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

I will welcome the nerfs to bunker 0/10/0/30/30 d/d cantrip specs as long as other weapon sets, other utilities and other traitlines are improved.

cantrip build is 10/10/0/30/20

actually….

And i feel they will destroy ele in PvE unless they limit the change to PvP
I think we have bad experience of anet balancing….

you’re missing my point. -.-

i think not…
When anet “balance” something they tend to destroy weapon sets and professions……
Staff was a weapon when D/D aura build wasn t a thing….
They just destroyed staff to address a build issue….
They didn t take in account what impact could it have on other builds…..

So in order to nerf 0/10/0/30/30 that actually isn t OP at all, they will probably just destroy any viable build on D/D

And then most player will swirtch to another weaponset….like happened with staff last patch.

To tell the truth i m hating how they are managing “balance……” i already quit WWW i hope i won t have to quit PvE also because i don t play pvp at all…

Zen.1965:

Too much “the sky is falling” mentality.

Too much naivety. Don’t ever trust them when they’re talking about how then don’t want to destroy certain builds/professions but just tone them down a little or whatever. They’re notorious liars on these matters.

ANet doesn’t bring stuff in line. Whenever they identify a certain build as problematic/too strong/hard to balance, they delete it from the game. It has already happened to Staff Ele and will soon happen to D/D Ele. So what are Eles left with then? S/F? Good luck setting up those Dragon’s Tooths while Thieves/Mesmers burst you down before that kitten thing even drops.

I mean, look at these guys. They already destroyed Staff Eles and now they’re dancing on their corpses announcing the AoE nerfs. And you really trust them on what they’re going to do to dagger eles?

Staff isn’t even remotely weak. Trying to use that as proof that Anet destroys builds doesn’t really do much for you.

dreztina.4820:

Staff isn’t even remotely weak. Trying to use that as proof that Anet destroys builds doesn’t really do much for you.

normal, non-vet mobs on staff feel like epic boss fights.

The only time I have to kite longer than that is greatsword mesmer soloing world champion. (and soloing the world champ on the mesmer is sometimes FASTER)

I’d say it demonstrates it perfectly.

the point is really easy…
Eles currently have just one surviving mechanic:

Healing

As mesmer have clones and thieves have stealth.

I don t think they will add mechanics to compensate so its easy to see why i think they will just destroy the profession….

Removing our only surviving mechanics will just make most builds unviable…just because they don t change how area are captured in PvP ….

That is the issue imho

Ummmm isn’t that exactly what they said two months ago in the last state of the game interview? Note the piper steps out at this point, sub-conscious evade of the backlash, strong the force in this one is.

EDIT: Oh man I had to just laugh when they start talking warrior/ranger around 1:03:50 – People considering Trap Rangers OP and nothing has been changed, just good players finding a decent build. Sound familiar to anyone around here?

D/D Ele Nerf, Engineer kit buff.

Seems to me that the AOE nerf is MAINLY for the Ele class. Why Anet?

When Anet put in treadmill progression into this game (ascended gears) I was rather disappointed and stopped playing for quite a while. I don’t do dungeons but who doesn’t want their characters to have the best gears?

Then my friend invited me to join him in WvW and ever since, I have been logging in everyday for hours and started to spend money on gems again.

Just a few days ago, I read news of Anet getting ready to swing a hugh nerf bat on the Ele class AGAIN. Well, I have stopped playing since. I shall wait and see how much damage is done to this class before I decide to pick up GW2 again or move on to upcoming MMOs.

I am tired of being hit by the nerf bat. Again and again. Really.

Mil.3562:

Seems to me that the AOE nerf is MAINLY for the Ele class. Why Anet?

When Anet put in treadmill progression into this game (ascended gears) I was rather disappointed and stopped playing for quite a while. I don’t do dungeons but who doesn’t want their characters to have the best gears?

Then my friend invited me to join him in WvW and ever since, I have been logging in everyday for hours. And I started to spend money on gems again.

Just a few days ago, I read news of Anet is going to nerf Ele AGAIN, I have stopped playing since. I shall wait and see before I decide to pick up GW2 again or move on to upcoming MMOs.

I am tired of being hit by the nerf bat. Again and again. Really.

They claim it is because everyone is complaining about the Ele… What about the freaking THIEF… This class has been sooo overpowered since Release, yet Ele gets nerfed more and more into the ground… The devs must main thief / warrior / mesmers. Maybe they have a secret sPvP team, cause the AoE complaint came from sPvP.

Caffynated.5713:

I didn’t really take that away from the SOTG at all.

They talked about ele being a case of having a bunch of little things that add up to being OP, but that they wanted to tweak ele (specifically D/D) down a little, but without playing whack-a-mole.

They talked about wanting to let the meta develop counters to things instead of just smashing them with the nerf hammer only to have the meta change and suddenly what was OP is now useless. One of the ideas they were pushing was bringing up other builds that are weak and making them essentially counter builds to the ele.

There are likely to be some nerfs, but I didn’t get the feeling that they were about to destroy anything like they did with evasive arcana.

I liked what the devs had to say for the most part. The problem is that they’re only talking to tPvP players who see everything through their gun fight in a hallway meta. They whine about things being OP that are weak anywhere outside of a shoe box. These SOTG talks really need to include people from WvW who have a better handle on how classes interact in a more complex environment than a 12’ radius circle.

Bringing up other builds is a nice way to balance, not just nerfing.

I play D/D Ele and they need to change something, D/D Ele at the moment in it’s present incarnation IS overpowered. I think healing power needs to be scaled down slightly and they need to try and figure out a way reducing the effect of boon stacking.

Hopefully they will make slight down-step adjustments, D/D Ele’s still have some of the best mobility in the game.

plasmacutter.2709:

If the devs have three brain cells, they will swap the regen on soothing disruption to something else.

it nerfs 30 water cantrip builds of the following:

- no more access to regen outside of water attunement
- 3 fewer condition removals.

it’s a small tweak that will make a world of difference where it matters without gutting elementalist group utility.

Oh, and this is a really good suggestion.