Guild Wars 2

Any staff users out there who though: “What the hell do i do with all this time?”
I´m ofcourse speaking about the evasive arcana nerf and how it affected staff.

Earlier today i was running dungeons with people, and there wasn´t a single moment i didn´t have something to do. If i wasn´t casting fire/earth on mobs, i was doing fields and capping them off with dodges and arcane wave, or if i had time, eruption. I was constantly positioning myself to reach other players with my fields and dodges all the time aviding mob attacks.
Now after patch i did dungeons again….and i was bored. There just didn´t seem to be much to do. Cast few spells from backline, roll in for arcane wave and get out, i seriously didn´t know how to use the rest of the time i had in my hands.

Anyone else felt the same?

Oh, and keep the balance/numbers/up/op discussion in relevant threads.

I haven’t felt like logging in yet, definitely sounds boring though.

I’m having a rather hard time getting enough motivation to even log in and play right now.

I’m on the lookout for different builds I could use, but the lack of build diversity means I’m having a hard time finding something I truly enjoy (like I did EA builds).

I mustered up the motivation to log in… It didn’t take long to get bored. It’s not that the EA nerf/fix destroyed my ability to kill or survive; it’s just not nearly as fun to fight anymore.

Agreed the sensation of being an Elementalist with a unique playstyle from other class is now almost on par with other classes. I didn’t like any other class because they all felt stale now the one class that I enjoyed and was constantly doing something is now just meh. My finger ballet has come to an end. As the curtain falls on our class once again I say thank you for taking away the reason I log in.

Epic Brownie.5843:

I mustered up the motivation to log in… It didn’t take long to get bored. It’s not that the EA nerf/fix destroyed my ability to kill or survive; it’s just not nearly as fun to fight anymore.

That´s exactly what i felt.

Meh, aguess it´s time to move on to d/d.

look at the bright side, now you can have fun the way the devs intended and go back to all the other super fun elementalist builds you weren’t using because they aren’t as much fun.

Fun the way the devs intended? I assume you mean roll a warrior, right?

Korath.7402:

Fun the way the devs intended? I assume you mean roll a warrior, right?

those are the guys that get to finish my fields, right? They are kind of tiny on my screen. You see, I can’t tell anymore, standing way in the back pushing two buttons since I no longer have any reason not be at max range except to rez. I stand in the back and follow the warriors, put down fields so they can pew blast pow while I hit 3 every now and again. It’s much fun.

so if you don’t want to reroll a warrior because the thought of leveling to 80 again makes you want to take a nap, just get toknow a few and convince them to let you follow them around so you can lay down fields for them. Tell them how uber you will make them, 25 stacks of might, brah!

D/D is next on the hit list I am willing to bet once we have grown to accustom to that play style. I say around Christmas holiday event. By the new year they will have effectively eliminated the Elementalist from the game and replaced it with Super-Warrior where every skill is insta-kill.

for some reason my gut told me to pick up two daggers with cof badges. good investment!

Bored? Not at all. My ele is just as fun as she was 2 days ago.

Elementalist isn’t fun in Cursed Shore unless you’re willing to solo a bit in staff while running to events. (Rapid out-of-combat build swap might fix that, but we don’t have it.) And I didn’t have the heart to be in tough staff fights without strong self-healing.

So I didn’t bother playing tonight.

I had fun when i tried the Tornado Elite skill. It threw a cow at a target when i pressed skill number 3.

I still don’t get why they removed the playstyle instead of rebalancing it to whatever they thought would be more fair.

Err… if all you do is “cast a few spells” from time to time as an ele, evasive arcana or not, then yeah, you’re doing it wrong. Sorry, but I still have tons of fun on my elementalist. I still have a ton of skills to combine and use, as opposed to any other class where I’m reduced to pushing the same three buttons over and over and watching pretty numbers fly. Now… that’s boring.

I feel like never actually starting this crap game anymore.

Strang.8170:

Meh, aguess it´s time to move on to d/d.

Don’t The only thing that made D/D any fun to play was dodging around generating combos while in melee combat.

However, I do find the massive amount of QQing on these forums highly entertaining. Talk about first world problems, oh my.

Ahh, when a patch comes up, the drama queens wake up, and the forums are filled with drama, oh drama, my god, so much drama!

Did I read anyone saying that Evasive Arcana is what made D/D fun? Really, seriously? D/D is extremely fun due to its level of intensity, fast-paced combat and mobility. It’s adrenaline inducing due to the low passive defenses and melee-range, and it’s a highly rewarding, highly satisfying weapon when you get used to it. And, when I mean mobility, I mean dodging out of attacks and catching in right after. D/D never was about mindlessly wasting your dodges around Ring of Fire to gain 6 stacks of might. D/D playstyle never depended on a single trait to be as awesome as it is. And with better RTL and M.Grasp, it should be even funnier now.

Staff’s playstyle, meanwhile, was always a bit bland. Most of the fun came from knowing how to combo your earth finishers with your other attunements’ fields, or crowd controling before or after you put in your fire nukes. Yes, yes, a single broken trait transformed staff from a combo field generator to a self-combo beast of a weapon, but you can still have that fun with two utilities and with three earth skills. It just requires more skill with the later. If Staff’s playstyle is bland, that is something inherently wrong with the weapon itself. The fact that a bug fix to a single trait can make the weapon a lot more boring to a lot of you, only shows the inherent problems with the staff. A weapon should not depend on a SINGLE trait to be fun.

That being said, I always got the idea that Elementalists were never meant to be specialized self-combo machines. Their self-combos usually come with restrictions. Scepter and Dagger are about might stacking and a bit of burning through combos – that’s mostly it. Staff self combos require utility skills and attunement switching, outside of a single trait that completely revamped that. Self-combos are usually best done by professions like the Guardian.

Nerf gaurdian self combos then. If we are not allowed to, neither should they nor anyone else for that matter.

I don’t miss the dodge spamming playstyle but I am missing the damage from might stacks. If you effectively used evasive arcana it was an easy 12 stacks of might, and now it’s gone.

I’m not missing the damage at all. Don’t need it. What I miss is the fun of making all kinds of crazy combos and dodging all over the place.

fixit.7189:

Nerf gaurdian self combos then. If we are not allowed to, neither should they nor anyone else for that matter.

Wrong, this is one of the many details that makes classes distinct from each other.

Guardians rely more on self-combo fields with a few of their weapons. Warriors and Rangers are more one-sided towards finishers. Staff elementalists are more one-sided towards fields. Other eles rely on self-combos, but are restricted to burning/ might stacking mostly. Mesmers have self-combos but can’t use them as often and reliably as Guardians can. Etc. Each profession is distinct at this.

Gaudrath.6725:

Err… if all you do is “cast a few spells” from time to time as an ele, evasive arcana or not, then yeah, you’re doing it wrong. Sorry, but I still have tons of fun on my elementalist. I still have a ton of skills to combine and use, as opposed to any other class where I’m reduced to pushing the same three buttons over and over and watching pretty numbers fly. Now… that’s boring.
kitten from all this complaining on the forum, you’d think your computer explodes if you try to play an elementalist.

yeah, moving around for no reason, just because you can, is fun and takes lots of skill!

tons of skills to combine and use…

auto attack 1, pop 2 and 3 when off CD. MAD SKILLZ BRAH!

Time to clarify my feelings a bit.

I do still enojy soloing with staff, though with effectiveness being taken few notches down, i think i´m moving to daggers because they´re just plainly put more effective and fun.
Staff solo gameplay just became rigid for me again, but allow me to explain why i feel so.
I levelled my toon with staff and pve i´ve played has almost exclusively been on staff. I know exactly how to make most use of the staff skills, i know every combo rotation i can feasibly use with it, i can keep kiting mobs so that they stay on lavafonts area, i know how to play staff and i can do it well. I picked up evasive arcana only rather recently, about 3 weeks ago, as i wanted to try out new builds, up untill then i had rolled 30/30 water and fire with 10 air.
What addin EA did to my playstyle was that it freed up my rotations a lot. I could play offense and defense simultaneously, i could make useful attunement swaps in a different orders than before, for example if i needed to heal i could do something else other than earth-eruption-water-geyser or water-healingrain-eruption. I could fluidly switch from healing with ea and warcane wave to offense with eruption and lavafont.
The point i´m trying to make is that adding ea to the play meant i could perform a lot more useful rotations than before, which meant i could play more intuitively and react better to situation than before. Now that it´s gone, i feel like i´m shackled to the old rigid rotations and tactics.

What i earlier said about staff gameplay becoming boring is mainly because the nerf severly limited reactionary gameplay.
It´s not feasible to support moving targets anymore without voice comms, eruption+field is just too slow for that. What it means is that there´s no good way to support allies pulling away from combat other than lobbing a cc field on them to let them disengage faster. Heals are too likely to miss with extra time needed for eruption, and your single arcane wave blast is rarely enough to make difference big enough for you to stop your other activities. It also means that it´s not worth it to might buff allies that are moving into combat or dodging around anymore either.
Buffing your backline has likevise become undesireable, because if you use eruption and lavafont or even eruption and burning retreat so that they don´t land on mobs too you´re severly limiting your damage output.
What remains feasible is to buff and heal your frontline, melee players and tanks. They are nice and stationary, you don´t waste your dps potential when might buffing, they make full use of any heals you can lob their way as they are already using their own finishers.

All this means basicly that i don´t need to position myself near the mobs anymore, as i don´t need to catch fleeing allies with my heals, or use ea to buff them. Range of staff allows me to stay far back, in most cases out of enemy fire, without sacrificing any of my effectiveness. I could move, but why put myself to risk?
It also means that gameplay has become a lot more predictable. I know exactly where my healing targets are, as well as where to buff. I don´t have to react to most things happening out there, except cast few cc fields every now and then.

If you’re a staff Ele that doesn’t play s/tPvP, welcome to the stand/nuke playstyle of the ranger class.

I hope you like Daggers…

And I didn’t have the heart to be in tough staff fights without strong self-healing.

So I didn’t bother playing tonight.

^this too. I won’t even step foot in Orr holding a staff anymore.