Guild Wars 2

For the last 15 month ladies and gentlemen , I have played as an elementalist .

For 2900 hours, I have tried every build.

For every weapon I equipped a thousand builds has been tested, I think the list of spoken NPC’s on my character would be – 1. trading post, 2. bank 3.trait reset
even more than the mystic forge!

NO MORE!

My fellow Elementalist’s I am here today , and I’m not normally writing complaint letters, and I rarely comment on changes in official forums.
But this has got to stop!
Do the people who do these changes even play the classes before they change these traits?
I’d like them to go as an elementalist into PvP and defeat someone

I mean any SANE person who ACTUALLY play as an elemementalist would understand the December 10’th balance changes, I mean common, 10% condition damage when in close combat, 10% condition dmg from toughness, WHEN THEY HAVE ABSOLUTLEY NO CONDITION APPLYING SKILLS BESIDES BLEEDING AND BURNING!? I mean, COMMON ,SRSLY!?

Now I am not here to caps lock my entire thread, I’m here to rant about the fact that during the recent changes to elementalist’s I can no longer enjoy my class , SPECIALLY when I see my necromancer fear people till they burst in a crying rage, my warrior stun lock people until they leave my arena, and my un-beatable condition/stealth Mesmer-which I cannot even begin to explain.

Now take a moment, create an elementalist and take him to PvP.
you have 4 choices:

Staff
Dagger/Dagger
Scepter/Dagger
Scepter/Focus

unless I’m blind I don’t see any of the above helping me defeat someone with the same skill level as me.
I’m not a bad player, I’d like to even consider my self hard core, because I take these thing’s very serious.

Unless I take a pure berserker I do absolutely no damage,
and as stated above , condition damage?
staff- burning , chill, blind, bleeding+cripple.
scepter/focus- Burning chill blind bleeding
dagger/dagger- burning chill bleeding+cripple

Where is the torment? the confusion? the fear? where is insane bleeding rangers do? or necros? wheres the 24 agony stacks mesmers can apply?
and I don’t think I’ve made it very clear, the skills that actually do apply conditions
are so dam terrible that you can’t even focus on
Your dagger/dagger has a launch of 4 seconds , that unless you’re strangled from head to feet, can’t move, and someone placed a rag on your head, only then you can’t evade, and even then takes a mili second to use a condition removal, and you have to wait 40 seconds again.- I am talking about -churning earth.
So lets not take this one, since you can’t really rely on your enemy to be stupid, that’s not how things work in this world.
Lets look at the scepter bleeding – auto attack of 3 projectiles that gives bleeding.
so… I’m supposed to auto attack my enemy till it actually has a decent amount of bleeding, which he can easily get rid of with his only 1 condition removal build, and I have to spend another 15 seconds trying to auto attack him.
or perhaps I should auto attack burn him?

but if you are nerfing my damage build, where are my other options?

Summoning weapons? 15 stacks, hardly something I can rely on to give me a damage output for 60 seconds cooldown.
Sure lightning hammer has some great damage output, and the ice bow can be used very nicely in some situations, but if I get into trouble and has to throw it? I have to wait 60 seconds running around the other player until I get it back.

I don’t think there’s an elementalist that can play without “Elemental attunment” despite their hard focus to change it.
and now that it is moved to 20, it’s really hard to pick anything else since I have to throw 20 at my arcana, in some cases it doesn’t bother me since I used 30 any how, but I tried not using arcana at all and you can really feel the difference.

So my conclusion is, there is no condition build that is even near balanced and equal in power compared to other classes, if you want to win a fight you need to go berserker and rely on invulnerability and blocks and evades and nuke your target before you run out of cooldowns.

So why not just open a warrior or a necro, or maybe a nice Mesmer to do the trick? maybe ill just open a kitten thief and go stealth all day so the elementalists trying to fight me , burn their cooldowns and i’ll just evade everything and then kill them with ease since they have nothing left.

Please, as an elementalist playing this game, stop nerfing arcana, and if you do? then at least give us proper tools to make other builds. because giving me a trait with condition damage when I have no condition skills to use to apply that damage is just absurd.

Thank you, and sorry for this long ranting letter.
I hope things get better for us the elementalists.

Same in pve. I’m not as experienced as you but I can say that pve’s state is sad as well. We get killed so fast from attacks so we need to evade as we can. A good suggestion will be to have a distance between you and the target/mob but any lvl 80 will know that our builds are all melee except staff that is boring to most and doesn’t do enough dmg. I see warriors when I play in Arah or FoTM, they do more or less the same dmg as me, and take hits that will take 2/3 of my hp without any problem. I see a lot of posts like this lately, and if it will be the same as diablo 3 than ele’s state will just get worst. We will reach a time when we get killed by one hit and won’t do any dmg while the warriors will keep pressing 1 and get the job done. Really, I played so far every build other than d/d, I know every rotation, and it is just rediculos what crazy combos and number of keys we need to press in order to get dmg as other classes.

People say elementalists have a high skill ceiling. I think it’s more a low floor. It’s exceptionally demanding, and a mediocre player can end up being terrible. A good player can probably be just as effective with several other classes. Moreover, he’ll do so with significantly fewer actions per minute and thus opportunities for error.

However, it’s also a fun class. The design is interesting. In most contexts, I think that makes up for the difficulty curve. Add in the potential synergies with your group from all those water and fire fields, and it may be more balanced than some of us think.

For example, the best AoE healer in the game is probably an elementalist, paired with a shortbow thief who is paying attention

I had a huge PvE DPS build scepter/focus, in PvE and it got nerfed to hell.
I could do more damage than hundred blades.
well… no more.
Back to the scratch board, I don’t think there is a way anymore where I can actually reach other classes damage.

I understand your pain. I have invested a lot of time into the Elementalist as well. I really like Guild Wars 2, but I really believe that Anet just does not care about the Elementalist.

I always gravitate to the mage classes, and I have to say that Anet’s vision of the prototypical “Wizard” is the worst I have ever seen (some games had terrible wizards, but were just terrible games, so they are excluded). The stealth and crafting systems are also the worst (but that is another discussion).

Anet talks about a “Great Migration,” well in about 4 – 5 months I think we will see just how many casters migrate from GW2 to a game with a decent mage class.

I do hold out some hope that Anet may do an overhaul because of the changes to the PvP system, and the collaborative efforts. The biggest challenge is going to be getting Anet to realize that the Elementalist cannot be balanced with a few trait modifications.

I remember around Eye of the North they rebalanced the Guild Wars 1 Elementalist. They changed the whole exhaustion system up, and really worked on some unique skills. With that track record maybe in a few years I will pop back into Guild Wars 2 (or just wait for Guild Wars 3).

I’m just sloughing on to the best of my ability. I’m even trying to make a BiFrost — and that 800gp Precursor is giving me a heart attack when I see GS Precursors for Warriors going for like half the price.

I’m sticking it out and hoping we see a light at the end of the tunnel. The hardmode we face has made me really good at avoiding damage, though I still get insults from Warriors who tell me to stack with the rest of them in dungeons or fractals…. sorry bro I die if I stack you do your thing I’ll do mine.

Mochann.5298:

sorry bro I die if I stack you do your thing I’ll do mine.

Soooo true!!!

Honestly, people who don’t have an elementalist just don’t get it what so ever. Any long term players still believe they are OP because they haven’t followed the patch notes and all the new comers can’t seem to grip this class got destroyed. Can’t deal damage even close to other classes and it’s a crying shame. I love my d/d ele, just as much as my mesmer, but it’s obnoxious to see my mesmer glass cannon things and my ele barely scratch them >.>

I’ve reached a point where I just try the stupidest things on my ele. I’m ready to put 30/30/0/0/10 and full zerk everything w/ scholar runes just to see if I can even pump out any numbers at all.

they dont even read your post did you see live stream where devs was playing warriors and giggling and laughing the whole time played foor 10 min.then they play necro guess what no laughing and played necro 30 sec maybe it was 3 min but still