Guild Wars 2

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”

Over the past two years, anet’s frequent nerfs to overall DPS have always impacted Ele the hardest. This is because we are meant to be the highest damaging class in the game, thus any general reduction will always impact those who benefit from damage the most. There’s several instances now where anet has almost directly targeted ele build(s) with their nerfing. The most recent before today was the might nerf, which D/D ele heavily relies on. Most agree that this was a lazy decision to avoid tackling the real problem of the Celestial Amulet. The critical damage nerf over a year ago was stated that “A full Berserker warrior will notice about a 10% damage decrease.”. In reality it was near 33%, and once again hit Celestial and Berserker eles the hardest, as they were the ones who most benefited from critical damage.

Today Frost Bow and Lightning Hammer are being “brought down to be in line” with other conjures, which are almost no use whatsoever. Granted, we don’t know the end results yet, but it’s clear they will be reduced. Another example is Bolt to the Heart, which is now a grandmaster trait. The devs have promised us that our ability to go further into another line will make up for the significant changes to our damage reduction. While this is true in a way, it will not make up for the loss in damage. This means eles have taken another step towards a sustain and support class instead of a massive damage class as stated. Not to mention the condition buffs shown.

After 2 years of this kind of continuous knock back, it seems clear now that Anet has decided eles are not to be what many of us originally made them for, lots of damage. This isn’t a post about over reacting to this single change, but the culmination of several changes resulting in a very different class today than it was when I made it two and a half years ago.

Also, I don’t want to be a Monk.

I want to be a Monk

Pve isnt the only game mode, a lot of people play an ele for more than just facerolling your keys as fast as you can to see big numbers pop up.

Besides we dont even know all the changes, so dont freak out just yet. You could easily end up with more damage than before.

I want to be a monk too!

Monk used to so OP! I want to be a monk as well.

Sizer.5632:

Pve isnt the only game mode, a lot of people play an ele for more than just facerolling your keys as fast as you can to see big numbers pop up.

Besides we dont even know all the changes, so dont freak out just yet. You could easily end up with more damage than before.

Humans are best known for “freaking out” about the “unknown”.

how i became a monks ??

I really loved the ideology.

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”

The ele is not worth it anymore for skill to reward ratio. They have the lowest defense and health pool in the game, if the damage is getting nerfed what use is there to play ele?

The elite specialization tempest should be something good, or ele will just be the forgotten profession. Its still decent in terms of damage, but not when compared with other professions. I don’t like the direction the balance team take the elementalist, especially for PvE.

Some suggestions:

• Make the adept air trait ‘’Ferious winds’’ depending on precision instead of healing power.
• Elemental attunement as minor trait in Arcana.
• More or higher damage multipliers in Fire and Air specializations. To compensate for the loss of dps.

Charr the big numbers I want dem big heals ! Where do I roll a Monk?

I understand what you are saying but Elementalist is already by far the highest dps profession in the game for PvE. And when you look at it we don’t know yet if that’s gonna be a nerf. Yes we lose some stuff, but we gain other stuff too. Staff build will be buffed for exemple and it’s already the highest dps build for Elementalist. And we still don’t know what will happen with condition which may matter now. If it end up a nerf for Elementalist it really don’t seem big and we still gonna be on top of the dps chart, i’m pretty sure of that. Let’s face it, Elementalist is kind of an op profession right now.

I always knew the ele as the top tier damage dealer so far, behind thief in single target only. What are you talking about? :-D

Sizer.5632:

Pve isnt the only game mode, a lot of people play an ele for more than just facerolling your keys as fast as you can to see big numbers pop up.

Besides we dont even know all the changes, so dont freak out just yet. You could easily end up with more damage than before.

They also took away another key damage modifier in bountiful power and put that in a GM position too.

I do not think people realize just how bad eles damage is being nerfed here.

Honestly I’ve found in nearly every game I’ve ever played those kinds of descriptions are often times romanticized, exaggerated and misleading. They’re designed to get you hyped up to play the class and should never be taken on face value. For all you know they saw Dragon Tooth and were like, “Oh! Oh! Massive damage in a single attack!” and then you get your hands on it and it’s like, “Oh…well that isn’t bad I guess.”

That said, if you go back through all the nerfs, the biggest hits have been to our survivability and not our damage. The conjure nerfs coming up are just one of a very few damage nerfs we’ve gotten over the years and honestly they ain’t wrong. They’re cheezy, lame all around and used as throw away weapons where you do 1-2 abilities then ditch them, use them as auto attack, or just for mobility. Really they should all be scrapped and redesigned entirely.

Wiz.1543:

I really loved the ideology.

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”

The ele is not worth it anymore for skill to reward ratio. They have the lowest defense and health pool in the game, if the damage is getting nerfed what use is there to play ele?

The elite specialization tempest should be something good, or ele will just be the forgotten profession. Its still decent in terms of damage, but not when compared with other professions. I don’t like the direction the balance team take the elementalist, especially for PvE.

Some suggestions:

• Make the adept air trait ‘’Ferious winds’’ depending on precision instead of healing power.
• Elemental attunement as minor trait in Arcana.
• More or higher damage multipliers in Fire and Air specializations. To compensate for the loss of dps.

I agree with what you say. Thief and mesmer both have a generally similar DPS output, similar Health and defense, yet they have stealth which is 10X better than the healing elementalists can provide. Fire and Air should be made more viable, since now everyone is gonna get forced into Arcane, Water and Earth, espec d/d.

Core idealogy was never really relevant after the initial marketing videos. Soooooooo, what you are saying OP isn’t really that big of a deal.

Sirendor.1394:

Wiz.1543:

I really loved the ideology.

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”

The ele is not worth it anymore for skill to reward ratio. They have the lowest defense and health pool in the game, if the damage is getting nerfed what use is there to play ele?

The elite specialization tempest should be something good, or ele will just be the forgotten profession. Its still decent in terms of damage, but not when compared with other professions. I don’t like the direction the balance team take the elementalist, especially for PvE.

Some suggestions:

• Make the adept air trait ‘’Ferious winds’’ depending on precision instead of healing power.
• Elemental attunement as minor trait in Arcana.
• More or higher damage multipliers in Fire and Air specializations. To compensate for the loss of dps.

I agree with what you say. Thief and mesmer both have a generally similar DPS output, similar Health and defense, yet they have stealth which is 10X better than the healing elementalists can provide. Fire and Air should be made more viable, since now everyone is gonna get forced into Arcane, Water and Earth, espec d/d.

Did you mean thief and ele? Otherwise I think we may be playing two different games…

If I understand it correctly it simply boils down to:

• Other classes have similar dps but; more armor and more damage mitigation / recovery options.

My 2 cents in for elementalists in PvE is about the same as yours. To me, zerk eles has always been a high risk high reward class with the least health pool and toughness and little to no defensive options (armor, hp, evades, stealth, aegis, clones.. etc) and a very high aggro leashing mechanic compared to the other classes. Instead, Elementalists have to rely on clever positioning, timely dodges and a good rotation to survive. It is true elementalists have always been the highest dps class among the professions, but currently we are able to choose whether to sacrifice an amount of dps to provide ourselves with more self sustainability or the team with more offensive team support. I enjoy the fact that to be able to balance a decent amount of dps along while keeping these other things, you have to show more skill. For example, the pure dps s/d elementalist does very high burst dps and gives a decent amount of support, but in order to do so you have position yourself in order to not get hit (90% hp trait and scholars), are not allowed to dodge and still complete your rotation perfectly. Even staff elementalists follow this ideology in solo situations — compared to a dagger focus setup which has a difficult rotation in order to keep up might stacks and dps, staff elementalists in turn provides more dps with the sacrifice of the self sustain of a dagger focus but are still required to be in melee range of their target to provide optimal dps. This design is what enable players to try to get better in what they do in order to achieve perfection. Yet, Arenanet is telling us that there shouldn’t be a potential for growth by giving effortless full party support to an already easy to play class with no significant dps sacrifice or skill level requirement, and giving the highest dps to the easiest to play meta elementalist build there already is. They are removing all motivation to improve and learn because.. why should I when I’m doing better than you with less effort? Even in PvP where dd elementalists are very much support and sustain have a complicated rotation in order to pull off a good balance with their support and their dps. Often I feel like Arenanet did not think this change through, summarizing the elementalists to be very unbalanced because of it’s potential shown by players who have already spent hours mastering the class.

Sorin.4310:

Sirendor.1394:

Wiz.1543:

I really loved the ideology.

“Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.”

The ele is not worth it anymore for skill to reward ratio. They have the lowest defense and health pool in the game, if the damage is getting nerfed what use is there to play ele?

The elite specialization tempest should be something good, or ele will just be the forgotten profession. Its still decent in terms of damage, but not when compared with other professions. I don’t like the direction the balance team take the elementalist, especially for PvE.

Some suggestions:

• Make the adept air trait ‘’Ferious winds’’ depending on precision instead of healing power.
• Elemental attunement as minor trait in Arcana.
• More or higher damage multipliers in Fire and Air specializations. To compensate for the loss of dps.

I agree with what you say. Thief and mesmer both have a generally similar DPS output, similar Health and defense, yet they have stealth which is 10X better than the healing elementalists can provide. Fire and Air should be made more viable, since now everyone is gonna get forced into Arcane, Water and Earth, espec d/d.

Did you mean thief and ele? Otherwise I think we may be playing two different games…

No definitely mesmer. Shatter mesmer in TPvP is extremely strong when you’re on the same skill level as an elementalist, damage output is supreme, yet we have stealth which makes mesmer more viable. A s/d -s/f ele either manages to get his burst off, or he’s gonna die really quick, mesmer can stealth out.

Ah, if you were talking about PvE… I don’t play it, sorry.