Guild Wars 2

Post 2 of 2

Gaius.2781:

Furthermore, I feel there should be a cost to having approximately 20 combat abilities at your disposal at any given time. This cost can be in the form of long cooldowns or “nerfed” effects by comparison to the abilities of other classes, but there needs to be a balance between cost and benefit.

It depends on what the developer wants right now, at this point they could bring ele up to par with other classes who currently use 1 spam Crossfire, 1 spam Trick shot, Haste + Heart seeker spam, Haste + 1 on thief sword, Haste + Hundred blades, summon 2 illusions and go invis repeatedly, etc etc.
OR
They can bring other classes to where the elementalist is currently at, and do away with 1 spamming.

The question becomes: is the design of the Elementalist working as intended? Is the player penalized appropriately for having this level of versatility, or is the player overpenalized (by either certain numerical values or general trait and ability design flaws [such as lack of synergy])?

Its too early in the games life to give a solid answer.

Just to give a personal example: I often find that a given combat can depend on whether or not I land a Dragon’s Tooth and/or a Fire Grab — but both of these abilities are very difficult to target appropriately (Dragon’s Tooth because you cannot manually lead the target, Fire Grab because the cone of effect is deceptive). This may or may not be a design issue — perhaps I’m simply not good enough to force my opponent to hang around under the gigantic stalactite until it lands. But when it does go wrong, I simply switch attunements until I can go back to my ability to do damage — and hope I survive.
What say you?

I say your doing it wrong xD (In a joking manner)
Here’s a vid of what i was doing at that moment when i read his post. Testing new things. There is options out there, explore. And thanks, This topic is really helping me to explore my own class. again this is just what i was doing at the time. im like 10 minutes into playing after making the build and im not used to it yet. but this shows potential. Enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scv_2nR3_2c&feature=youtu.be

@razerie, I figured you would view it as a convenient “O i deleted it”. I know vsing me was a big episode in your journey through gw2. But I record a TON of footage. Every match, guides, builds, etc…etc… Im sorry the footage of me vs you was a very minor part of my history.

In most cases, an elementalist will do three times the ‘work’ of other classes to achieve the same, or slightly lesser results. By work I mean both keypresses and decisionmaking. All of those take time, and they increase the chance that your fantastic five-skill combo will somehow be interrupted, or the target will simply move out of your ground-targeted AoE.

In terms of style and flash, elementalists are fantastic. They’re only better statistically in WvW sieges or zerg clashes. In all other cases, a good player can still get good results, but they’d get better results on a different class.

If we’re going to take six keypresses (and the time it takes to fire off all those skills) to do anything useful, we need to be doing it far better than classes who do the same thing in less time.

“In most cases, an elementalist will do three times the ‘work’ of other classes to achieve the same, or slightly lesser results. "

Do the other classes have 25 skills, with the level of versatility that comes with those 25 skills?

incisorr.9502:

I stopped it the moment i saw youre using scepter/dagger.

Ele is not strong, you’re useless and you get carried by your team. Sorry to break it down to you

Maybe you could come own me with your glass cannon staff build
1200 games played in Spvp? CSB
stay in spvp. I’ll go get carried in tournies.

Using a Staff is getting carried, cause you can’t achieve anything yourself^^

Spvp includes tournaments, rofl.

Using a staff is getting carried? Using a staff is being useful for your team, this is a team game not a 1v1 game. The problem with all the noob eles is that they wanna be strong for 1v1 and go s/d . Sure ill give you that, S/D > Staff for 1v1. This is not a 1v1 game, theres no mod for 1v1.

I’m not saying Staff is useless… but you won’t win any games cause of a Staff Ele. And yes, 1v1 is important as well, since you will have lots of 1v1’s/2v2’s.

No need to fight over this, Incisorr. I can see why staff is good for organized team-play, where you are communicating via TS/Vent during the right. However, for normal sPvP, where people run off and you end up alone a lot of the time, Dagger/Dagger (And even Scepter/Dagger) is better than staff.

hard to play is ok, I will stick with this class no matter what, but frustrating is a different story.

Anyone ever played the original D&D? (yeah, paper and dices one)
lv1
mage 1d4 HP, magic missile 1d4 (+1 per level) damage
warrior stomping everything with giant hammer

lv20 (cap)
warrior still stomping everything with an insanely huge mega-hammer
mage sleeps in a flying mountain built by himself, has a dragon as butler, can cast Wish and obliterate cities if he feels so inclined ecc ecc

This is what’s is currently missing in Elementalist: reward for climbing to cap struggling everyday.

As I already stated many times about this subject, it is ok to be one hittable, as long as we can do exactly the same. That’s balance.
This game is not meant for only top players, servers would be empty: casual players should be able to enjoy every class with the same effort, although those who decide to dive deeply in a class should be awarded properly too.

What’s surprising me the most, is Anet staying silent on this topic… but they have been very helpful so far so I am confident everything will be fine.

As someone who knows how to play the class, I don’t expect nor WANT a bonus for playing it right. I don’t WANT to be overpowered.

Utilizing elementalist 100% should yield the same result as utilizing a Thief 100%. I don’t care how hard it is to utilize either to 100%.

Turbo Whale.1738:

Do the other classes have 25 skills, with the level of versatility that comes with those 25 skills?

Other classes have 10 skills, compared to our 20. But the answer to your question is generally, “yes, they have an equal number of useful abilities.” About half of our abilities in any given weapon set have the same function, “reduce opponent hit points.” Giving most of the cooldowns and sticking them in different attunements does not add to my versatility. It simply means I have more keys to press in order to continue doing damage.

Thanks for the videos, they were really informative and helped me iron out some issues I had starting off with the Ele in sPvP. I was actually running d/d with an identical point distribution but more offensive majors. Your tutorial convinced me to try out s/d and I’m holding my own a lot better now. I still like d/d but it seems like it’s just not as well rounded for roaming dps in retrospect.

I did end up modifying the build a little bit and dropped 5 from air to get Final Shielding for some added survivability since I tend to solo/pug a lot. I don’t know that the vulnerability was really that worthwhile to begin with it seems to be one of the “deceptive” traits where—in practice, the effective application rate ends up being much lower than advertised after it gets eaten by dodges and aegis all the time.

It was interesting to see your perspective since my main is also a Mesmer and when you opened up your pvp tab the gameplay split was almost identical to mine though I’m sure I have way fewer games played. I tend to think the abilities are more straight forward for Eles but the attunement switching throws a wrench in clockwork you don’t see in classes like rangers, thieves and warriors.

I actually had a much easier time learning to play my Mesmer than I did the Ele. With the Mesmer I pretty badly neglected using my shatters when starting out and with the Ele the main thing I found myself neglecting was properly using my elite which lost me a ton of fights lol. I guess it just helps to be able to neglect your class’s F-abilities while you’re familiarizing yourself with the playstyle. It seems like there’s some sort of misguided expectation from a lot of people that class abilities shouldn’t be required use to play at a high level. Anet’s buffs for the derpspam builds of numerous classes from BWE3 to live came as a big surprise to me. They made some bad choices imo; I’d have much rather seen some damage nerfs to Mesmers and Warriors than the crazy buffs to Retal, Thieves, Engies, etc.

anywho, thanks for the vid and don’t forget to mind your ratios! For every 5-6 troll posts from the same person there’s a new random person popping in for a shout out which isn’t too bad of a ratio for an official forum of a game this size.

Oghier.7419:

In most cases, an elementalist will do three times the ‘work’ of other classes to achieve the same, or slightly lesser results. By work I mean both keypresses and decisionmaking.

I read the entire thread, and that’s pretty much what I took from it – Elementalists give insufficient ROI.

A doctor makes more money than a dishwasher. It’s a more difficult job, so it gives better rewards. No matter how awesome the dishwasher is at washing dishes, he won’t make more than the doctor. A higher skill floor should come with a higher reward ceiling.

It doesn’t matter how astounding a fighter pilot’s reflexes are, they’re limited by the capabilities of the jet they’re flying. No matter how skilled someone is at playing a particular class, they eventually run into the limitations of that class.

The Elementalist one of the more difficult classes to play, with 20 weapon skills (4×5) versus the 10 weapon skills (2×5) most other classes have. A player perfectly using 20 abilities should be able to achieve things that a player perfectly using 10 abilities cannot.

Very new Ele here — so ymmv.

I first rolled a warrior to 80. Great class, and I don’t ever play with a greatsword because good players make you look like an idiot every time you try HB — but the play was very intuitive (which I can now do to any warrior trying to setup HB). Wasn’t difficult to find several builds that all work for different reasons, and in the end I went with a shout build that heals and is incredibly tanky. Good fun.

Played a few classes, and started an Ele. Really fun in pvp, but holy crap can do I die quickly in situations where I take really ANY damage. My damage output is slow to build up, but good once I get there assuming I’m, you know, still alive. So pve, if anyone cares, the damage is slow and could use some tuning. Now, in unorganized pvp, the class is a little rough. I like the idea of support for sure, but the problem is that unless you have other players who understand your support roll, and potentially build into playing off it, you really lose a lot of value quickly — people build for their deathmatch play, leave you on your own, and realy we get to pick burst fire damage based off arcana/signets, or more durability and weaker damage output.

So far, my real gut feeling on the class is that it simply can do too many different things, and in trade for that it doesn’t do any of them particularly well (well being subjective). Playing as an ele is challenging, and I have yet to really find how to shine.. it’s fun, but frustrating. Inversely playing as a warrior (axe/shield // rifle) I run into two types of else: glass cannons I can wipe the floor with, or ones that are really good at running away.. i’ve never really seen one that was a threat to me 1v1, or made the difference in a group fight they were a part of. Admittedly though, this could be just a function of bad players.. but videos with mad editing of 100’s of fights for 3 minutes of footage aside, I’d really like to see a good ele from the other side just to understand how one can be effective.

@Dark,
“I read the entire thread, and that’s pretty much what I took from it – Elementalists give insufficient ROI.”

Of course, anyone who got some analytical skills & have invested some serious playing time as an Elementalist would come to that conclusion. But then, this is a game forum with all kinds of life forms.

“The Elementalist one of the more difficult classes to play, with 20 weapon skills (4×5) versus the 10 weapon skills (2×5) most other classes have. A player perfectly using 20 abilities should be able to achieve things that a player perfectly using 10 abilities cannot.”

That is if you assume the 20 abilities are qualitative match the 10 abilities from other professions. If they are not qualitative match, then it becomes a totally poor ROI as obvious as what I just quoted from you above. QED.
Of course with the exception of people who love to do dish-washing just for the love of it regardless of their poor ROI.

The fact that you had to create a thread to tell people the ele is okay proves something is very wrong. When you need guides and manuals to tell people how to build “their” character that’s where the problem arises.

When I first played as a ele doing the bwe it was okay I could at least handle 1 on 1 situations and people partied up a lot more to carry the ele while I supported them things have changed drastically since.

Starting off as a ele with out group or anyone willing to party is a slow painful lesson every 1 on 1 battle is a fight to the death even if it’s a cow it’s still a 50-50 match. And if a group gets a hold of you it’s all over, and I’m not talking a large group with 5-6 I’m talking a group of 2-3 monsters is enough to force the ele into retreating.

I can’t even play smart in make 1 monster leave off from the group because the 1 monster is still a risk for me. Before posting I did some things to make sure I wasn’t the problem I upgraded my armor i even changed my play-style and switched up atunements more often.

At this point the ele feel’s more like a inconvenience then anything. I want to compare it to something but I can’t quiet put my hand on what to compare it to. maybe a teacher it requires a lot of learning but the payout is very low.

Let’s look at it:
- We are the squishiest profession in the entire game. Obviously, we have good defensive skills, but so does a lot of other professions. We have the worst passive defense, the worst HP, and no stealth/ virtues/ clones/ pets/ death shroud/ anything to compensate.
- As a compensation, we used to be one of the best bursting professions in the game, until we were nerfed big time during beta. We actually could burst as high as, say, a HB warrior, although with more effort. But hey, we’re still versatile, right?
- Not really, we aren’t as versatile by having twice the skills as much as people think. We are greatly restricted by range, which is huge, and our skills are usually simpler than the skills from other professions. We usually need to use 2 skills, sometimes 3 or 4, to get the same results as a single skill from other professions. Think Focus’ Obsidian Flesh is awesome? Love your fire bursting skills? Look at Mesmer’s Blurred Frenzy: burst and invulnerability for 2s, available every 8s. Oooooh.
- We have countless other drawbacks. Higher recharges than normal, higher casting times than normal, easy to avoid bursts, etc.

We can change to earth anytime to defend ourselves, but that’ll take us away from almost anything else. We can change to water to heal ourselves, by sacrificing everything else. And so on. But look at a Guardian’s staff: good healing, good movement control, decent-good damage, and they still have the virtues and better armor to boot. We can change to fire to deal mediocre-decent damage at the cost of everything else, we can change to air for more mobility and to set up bursts. Hmm, let’s look at Guardian again, now with Sword+Torch. Teleport + aoe blind every 10-12(?) seconds, projectile-protection-while-bursting, strong auto-attack, strong burning that can be thrown, and yet another burst+burning skill (that can heal conditions from allies!). Oh yeah! With better armor, virtues, better traits, better elites, better downed state and much better underwater, to boot.

My opinion may not matter as much as some, I’m only a lvl 47 ele currently. But I get roflstompped in WvW. When I say roflstomped, I mean I literally die in 2 hits. I’ll need to post a video. All I know is that isn’t skill based, and it certainly isn’t fun.

About the “ROI” comments. I put GW2 Elementalist on the same level of a Warhammer Online Engineer (less the WAR Engineer ability to spec for big burst with a morale ability).
Able to do a bit of everything, it’s mostly a stumbling block on the path of other classes that will waste some time (short time in case of certain classes) killing them to go ahead with their business. The keyword for them was “they are annoying”. Not dangerous, just annoying.
On my guild forum there’s a massive inter-class analysis (lots of spreadsheets) proving how even going the most useless DPS tank build, the ele is still below the minimum required defense to be considered sufficiently survivable.

This also brings up another topic. Kyros is doing an admirable job. Like other competitive guilds he’s studying, theorycrafting, testing builds and gear combos, really squeezing off the “with this build I crit for 300 higher on 62% of the crits” limit cases.

Now, in other MMOs I have seen most classes trying this kind of extreme optimization, it’s proof the classes are fairly balanced when people are spending hours to squeeze out that tiny further advantage.

In GW2 instead I have never, never bothered doing this big work for my warrior, because… it’s not even needed. I mean, why care for the 0.5% elementalists who will woop my posterior when I can 3 button smash 99.5%?
I am sure the other players think the same, they just see Ele = free score.
Who cares if once a week you meet the Kyros who will, with great fatigue and flawless execution, beat your warrior | thief | mesmer | guardian?

The very fact he’s so dedicated into squeezing out the last few hundreds damage after long study and spec testing is a testament of how hard is to achieve just parity with another class played by a mediocre player.

I picked this class up several weeks ago when everyone was complaining how bad it is, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to anything else. The fast-paced playstyle suits me just fine, and I feel somewhat confident about my steadily improving performance in PvP. Imo, the Elementalist is the most “balanced” class in the game right now.
The issues many people in this thread adressed still stand, however: The current game balance has classes that can get away with much sloppier play and still perform on par, if not better, than a decent “complex” class. Arena Net should address these three-button specs. They might make the game easier to pick up for new players, but ultimately lead to a horrible Hot-Join experience and don’t really allow for a varied meta to evolve.

One question to the OP and other experienced Ele players:
How do you go up against a decent Shortbow ranger? I die in seconds when they pop RaO or their roots if I don’t play my very best – but even if I do, their sustained damage is often simply too much. I pretty much need to use all my defensive cooldowns to live through ten seconds of focused ranger fire.
Kiting, LOSing, dodging, strafing and trying to time stuff to negate their quickness bursts are all concepts I’m trying to apply to my play – it feels like I’m playing a Chopin piece on my keyboard while they autoattack – yet I’m still losing to many good rangers, and die do bad ones if I screw up. Any tips besides “not being a glasscannon” would be much appreciated.

edit: I’m playing S/D with 30 arcana.

Kill the roots fast or your days of dodgeroll healing are over.

Scepter / Dagger is the only way to roll in skilled tournaments.

Im playing Staff right now…. i might switch over for tournie play to staff.
And if u spec and rune correctly you can walk out of the roots because the imobilize is so short you can just walk our before it is reapplied.
http://www.twitch.tv/jzoo

Vaerah.4907:

The very fact he’s so dedicated into squeezing out the last few hundreds damage after long study and spec testing is a testament of how hard is to achieve just parity with another class played by a mediocre player.

It’s true. You have to work harder on an ele than other classes in order to achieve the same thing. But making the ele more powerful would mean that All the top tier and competitive players would then play Ele because it was the best class in the game when played correctly.

The class is hard to play because it is so versatile, but because it is versatile I am useful in ANY situation. Meanwhile I dodge your Bulls charge, eat your shield charge mist form your 100 blades always saving a dodge for your eviscerate. You as a warrior can’t do anything in that situation. Guess it’s kinda shetty i still end up winning with like 20% life from you spamming 1 on your greatsword.

Warrior isn’t and can’t be used in competitive play unless in a support shout/banner type role. Opa has a fun Stunlock build with his warrior and i know he’s popular, but its not competitive.

Kyros -.- like the guy said before your one of a kind buddy its nice to see but the general idea is people are looking for a change to the ele keep the complicated learning aspects but give some rewards for it as well

just because the ele gets a boost doesn’t mean everyone’s going to jump ship because it will still have the same steep learning curve and different skills/controls/unities

while the other classes have ease of use with rewards -.- people who pick ele weren’t going in saying well this class looks like it will own all the others easily i researched I knew what to expect what i didn’t expect was to be nerfed because of the learning curve

when you do twice the work you should get twice the reward right now its like were taking an exam and acing it just to be told their is an even harder exam because we did so well -.-