Guild Wars 2

So I was previously PSYCHED about the change to glyph of elementals, dreaming of controlling the fire-burst, using the air-stun while cc’d as a pseudo-stunbreak, getting on-demand heals from the water ele, but then….

Why do the activated abilities have 3/4s cast times, in addition to the delay on activation from the elemental, and IN ADDITION to a 1.25s cast time for the actual skill?

Why are the activated abilities so freaking weak?

The water ele does:
- 10 healing on the water ele which doesn’t even show up in my combat log, a small KB, and less damage than an auto. I guess this elite heals 1 condi?

The fire ele does:
- Good damage on the second of 3 hits at some point in the next 5-10s, and is thus IMPOSSIBLE to setup.

The air ele does:
- A 1s stun sometime in the next 5-10s, sometimes even after doing a regular attack. This stun doesn’t even work with lightning rod.

The earth ele does:
- Very little damage, a short cripple, and gives a 4s of prot. with a 3/4s cast time + delay.

The fact that there is a cast time PLUS a long delay on these skills makes only the fire eles worth using, and only if you are out of range of your enemy.

I feel like this was a big net-nerf to our only truly viable elite left.

Opinions?

Should be instant cast, IMO. Look at things like spirit weapons, ranger spirits, and necro minions. Their activated abilities don’t have cast times (aside from the healing skill ones) as the minion or whatnot already has to play an animation to use their skill. Doesn’t make sense that you’d have to perform a cast animation to trigger another cast animation to then cast the skill.

I haven’t really examined how much damage and such they do, but the usability of the skills is in clear need of improvement.

Of course, some of it just comes down to the AI being dumb and the elementals having the same lame animation and skill characteristics as the mobs do, but that’s another matter.

The tooltip on the water ele is bugged. It actually does heal for 6-7k. Unfortunately it takes about 10 seconds for the water ele to cast the heal so you’ll probably be dead by the time it goes off.

I made some testing – fire ele has about 2k dmg on active with 3/4 sec casttime… Ice ele’s heal nerfed from 6,5k to like 200? Im feeling it dies before doing something. Air ele had instastun – now after cast he makes slow flying orb. Still only air is usable, rest is worse then parrot (from rune).

Kaldrys.1978:

The tooltip on the water ele is bugged. It actually does heal for 6-7k. Unfortunately it takes about 10 seconds for the water ele to cast the heal so you’ll probably be dead by the time it goes off.

I tried my hardest against the profession trainers to get ANY healing at all, and never saw any numbers. I even made it so the ele, my target, and me were all bunched up. I don’t think it heals at all now.

The funny thing is that if you want to use their skills – you must have a target and be in combat otherwise they just fail. Ele doesn’t have a viable elite for now.

I run a Glyph build for quite some time and I use both summoning Glyphs, so I have experience with how those two worked so far and learned how to pop them effectively.
But, what looked like a buff to summons made those special attacks and the summon worse for several reasons:
1. The activation time of the special ability is 3/4 sec, which is no instant cast, but actually a full skill use. It feels much longer in-game (probably due to the AI figuring out priorities). This breaks your normal skill chains and makes you lose one or two auto-attacks at least.
2. Welcome to the world of Ranger pets BEFORE the fixes to pet AI. The execution of the skills takes a while, so the added time until the skill hits, is 2-3 seconds at best.
3. The recharge of the special skill is at 15 sec(on the Elite), so you can use it three times if you are lucky but if you don’t want to use it at recharge, you might only get two uses.
4. The earth “Stomp” is at 18 seconds, which does not look so much more than 15 for the others, but adds up in the time frame of only 60 seconds.

I really wish the skill activation would be instant and would not interfere with the normal use of skills. Also, the Ranger’s pet AI seems to work much better these days, why can’t the summon share the pet AI?

Wow, just wow.

They are absolute garbage now. The abilities have 3/4 sec cast times, then the elemental may or may not cast it, and usually after a 3-4 sec delay.

Then unless the player/mob is standing right on top of it (not air), it won’t get hit.

The air one can miss.

The elementals won’t attack unless you attack first.

Since the elementals have a radius for effects (like the speed from air), you have to be really close to get it, so it makes it so clumsy to use.

Completely useless in both www and pve.

Yea been testing the glyph and a glyph build it sucks. the cast times on glyph of elemental makes it worst than having the elemental randomly cast it. Worst than that is the elemental does not even use it at the right time. Cast time, elemental move into range, then it finally cast the spell. So after 3s it cast the spell you want it too. d

Also, a glyph build does not work with all of the long cast times in pvp. In pve you can get away with those cast times. The traits for glyphs do seems useful but the cast time make it useless. Try a regen build with glyphs 0-6-2-6-0 to have a dozen or so cleanse a minute but condition still wreak it. Overall glyphs are worst for pvp now.

The only activated ability i noticed is the fire elemental, all the other abilities i either miss from bad position or my lack of seeing any of them in the first place.

For once i agree with a negative thread. It is realistically a change for the worse from my perspective as well. The heal from water ele is still awesome and can be casted ahead of time without an issue.

yet another example of anet having good idea and totally kittening up implementation

I guess ele summons now have the same bad AI as ranger pets had before they got kinda fixed a few months ago…. their f2 abilities always activated with a delay, the pet first finished what it was doing, and then after a few seconds of thinking, maybe performed the skill. If it had a good day.
Now those pets react immediately most of the time, so at least ranger pets have that going for them, which is nice.

They need to make these act like the fixed ranger pets -_-

I liked the idea of it but yeah, this oddly made things worse. They need to significantly reduce or remove the cast time to make this anywhere remotely good (or buff the actual abilities when they do go off).

The only positive I can see out of this is that it makes us do a glyph casting animation much more often now, meaning people might interrupt this instead of say, a heal.

So we lost one of our two good elites? I guess I’ll stick to FGS in WvW and use it now in SPvP as well. Ugh.

Okay. I have tested this elite for 3 hours.

It is broken and has been made worse.

Back to FGS i guess

Yeah it doesn’t work half as good as it used too.

Seriously to be worth using it would need to be 300% faster, do 1000% more damage, have 400% more hp and have a recharge twice shorter.

Nice balancing fail again.

That’s just sad.

Way to go Arenanet.

I really wonder if whoever worked on these changes ever played an elementalist. The changes to glyph are terrible.

-Need a target instead of the AI auto selecting what you are attacking, If you don’t target something the ability will not cast.
-Your character has to cast the dam ability, wtf!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?? Now the enemy will know its coming.
-The AI is clunky so the elemental takes its sweet time casting at times.

Having to cast the dam ability is the dumbest thing ever. D/D ele needs to be on the move all the time, stopping to cast for my elite just gives the enemy a HUGE opportunity to see your animation and simply dodge it where as before they had to concentrate on you and not see the attack incoming unless they were really paying attention. If anything there should be no casting time and it should be instant, else you just leave yourself open for the enemy just to use one dam clunky glyph skill.

Anet just killed all of the ele’s elite. At the moment I just use fiery great sword to move around, I don’t even bother to use it for any damage since it has none. The damage increase to skill #4 with a target is nothing to praise.

RIP ele elites.

Force.2841:

RIP ele elites.

Once again: we saw it coming a mile away, we told them, they didn’t listen.

I am not trying to be negative or whine, but I don’t understand why there is a cast time on the elite activation at all. Isn’t the actually pet wind-up enough warning that there is an attack incoming? Does it really require a cast-time that is FOREVER on top of the pet animation, giving 2 opportunities to stop it?

I seriously don’t want to take any elite anymore, to be honest. FGS does less damage on the main hit of Fiery Rush now. Tornado is useless for anything other than going YOLO with lightning rod. Glyph is now so clunky and slow, its not even worth casting the abilities. At least you can queue up the fire ele’s ability OOC and he will use it when you enter combat, I think.

Aw, I was all excited about these changes since I like to play with Elementals for fun now and then, but this topic is making me much less excited.

I don’t really mind the delay on the elemental using the attack, its pretty much in-line with most other minion summons. They just que the ability to be used the next time they use an attack.

But making the elementalist have an animation to activate the skill? That’s stupid. The only other minion that requires the caster to do something to activate the ability is the Necromancer’s Flesh Golem, and that ability is almost good enough to warrant that since its a powerful knockback (though it sounds like that one got nerfed yesterday too, so it might not need the cast animation any more either). None of the elemental abilities are THAT good. Not to mention its actually somewhat of a nerf to the ability, since even though you now have some control over when they happen, it comes at a cost of making you do nothing for a bit. I’d almost rather have no control but at least have it happen automatically.

Unfortunately, there is a big problem that existed since the BWEs which makes the elementals—both normal and elite, useless to a high degree: survivability. Other than the paper thin defense on any non-earth elemental, the AI and reaction speeds are also very poor. Add in the cast times, aftercast times, and low numbers (from the skills), and you get an elite skill that is anything but elite.

Had the elementals actually been able to withstand a decent amount of damage (somewhere around 30k damage minimum for each elite elemental in PvE), then it would make them useful given their 60 second lifespan. I believe that even if the elemental had better AI, it still wouldn’t have a good enough impact without skills that activated instantly and could be ground targeted.

Glyph of elementals is not worse, we are just realizing how crappy is

BlackBeard.2873:

Tornado is useless for anything other than going YOLO with lightning rod.

LOL ikr, you can also use tornado for swiftness stacking since it’s a lighting field

Gorani.7205:

1. The activation time of the special ability is 3/4 sec, which is no instant cast, but actually a full skill use. It feels much longer in-game (probably due to the AI figuring out priorities). This breaks your normal skill chains and makes you lose one or two auto-attacks at least.
2. Welcome to the world of Ranger pets BEFORE the fixes to pet AI. The execution of the skills takes a while, so the added time until the skill hits, is 2-3 seconds at best.

These two are the ones that really hurt.

They recognised that Ranger pets sucked. They fixed those.

They finally give us practical control over our summons, while nerfing both of our other elites… and mess it up in the same ways as they did with Rangers’ class mechanic for a year and a half.

They need to cancel current skill queues and cast immediately – this applies whether the player has to dedicate time to triggering it, or if the chain skill is instant cast.

chris.6583:

LOL ikr, you can also use tornado for swiftness stacking since it’s a lighting field

Most useless field ever… Seriously who would blast a tornado for swiftness? They should have made it a new field that give shock aura instead. It would at least have been interesting.

The delay on the “on demand” skills is really bad, makes it not really worth using. Only elemental worth using at all is earth elemental for the same reason as you always used it.. to take hate from you and let you do ranged damage while it tanks when soloing.

FGS fiery rush’s last hit hits for about the same as a lava font tick, slightly higher, but you’re not getting the fireball damage on top of the lava font hit.

People actually thought it was going to be a good damage skill, very funny.

Funny thing is that the glyph was like that all the time.Just you not having any control of the skills made you not counting on them at all.. so you didnt really mind that they were so unreliable.Like the healing from water ele.Pls tell me a god that could use that skill consistently??! Most of the times i were “Heal me you kittening piece of kitten” and nothing would happen.
Now that you know when this skills will happen you can witness by yourself how unreliable they are..Thats the only change! Casting time isnt that long imo and its not what makes the feel of the skills bad. still think its kind of a buff though

Devildoc.6721:

People actually thought it was going to be a good damage skill, very funny.

This has to be a bug..For the love of god i hope it is

Avead.5760:

Funny thing is that the glyph was like that all the time.Just you not having any control of the skills made you not counting on them at all.. so you didnt really mind that they were so unreliable.Like the healing from water ele.Pls tell me a god that could use that skill consistently??! Most of the times i were “Heal me you kittening piece of kitten” and nothing would happen.
Now that you know when this skills will happen you can witness by yourself how unreliable they are..Thats the only change! Casting time isnt that long imo and its not what makes the feel of the skills bad. still think its kind of a buff though

Devildoc.6721:

People actually thought it was going to be a good damage skill, very funny.

This has to be a bug..For the love of god i hope it is

Well I’ll tick lava font for about 4k damage, and add a 4k fireball into their face every couple seconds as well, or I’ll fiery rush into them for about 5k damage.

I’m actually thinking Tornado + Lightning Rod might be viable instead, though Anet will probably gut Lightning Rod once people start getting melted by it in certain ways and complain.

Instant cast would be fine, but even then, it kinda breaks into your rotation.

I was hoping it would work the way Ranger’s ‘F2’ skill works. You can hit it as part of your normal rotations, and it in no way impacts the queue of your ‘10 skill’ bar.

Other than that, I like the idea, and I use it quite a bit, even though I realize I’m probably taking a DPS hit sneaking it into my rotation.

Tornado would be nice if we could move like a hurricane, let’s say 300km/h. We could use it as mobility tool like FGS.

MyPuppy.8970:

Tornado would be nice if we could move like a hurricane, let’s say 300km/h. We could use it as mobility tool like FGS.

lol because a “run-away” tools is the only elites an elementalist is worth having apparently.

Where are the people that designed Guild Wars 1 when you need them? They had good elite ideas.

From Tornado, what I really want is aimed attacks. Cast lightning bolts at a target or an area. Launch a cow at a location to CC.
The Dust Devil thing iunno... I guess probably just adding blinding pulses to the field? Just call it a dusty storm!

What an absolute failure… Nice implementation Anet….

Everyone pretty much point out all the problems, I guess I don’t need to add more.

The only positive side… is… for a visual pleasure, the added color on the glyph make it look “nice” on my skill bar. (I know this has no real practical use)

If they can at least… increase both caster and elemental casting time, improve AI or… lower the recharge rate! That will overcome quite a lot of issue.

Or if Anet insist they remain this way, my solution would be Elite Elemental last until it die on battle, give an extra stronger 2nd aoe skill! (for example, after you command water ele using crashing wave, the skill bar change to another aoe maelstrom skill or something). While the lesser one remain the same (or we summon two lesser one?)

Anet don’t share much love with Elementalist, I don’t know if the balance team will actually read our post, lets hope they do!

They are not even replying. They rush these thing out obviously not testing them long enough and then ignore the community.

At least someone at Anet replied to the new levelling system fiasco and said they would fix it. Can we get a fix for our useless elites as well?

Sadly I have to agree with all of you.. I also was somehow interested when I saw this change coming, but in the end it just made things worse.

I do not think the basic idea is bad, and I like the little colorful touch, but the implementation really needs fixes. The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

It is as the time when the skill hits almost feels like random.. and that is not acceptable considering the PvP combat flow of GW2.

I really hope Anet will fix things giving us some more control on the skill, e.g. reducing the time between the command and its execution by the elemental or considering some other fixes suggested by other players in this thread.

It would be nice to also introduce a clarifying note in the skill description including the interval between execution and command – i.e. the ‘casting time’ of the elemental. The fact that it lacks right now is already an indicator that something is wrong.

the only positive change is that the icon changes color according to attunement and their skill icons are pretty awesome

other than that their functionality sucks and their skills should be off the GCD just like other professions summon’s skill

Iriel.9048:

The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

That they have to be in combat is especially important here – there is absolutely no way to get a reliable attack off from this thing because it’ll always be added behind something already in the queue.

cheese.4739:

Iriel.9048:

The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

That they have to be in combat is especially important here – there is absolutely no way to get a reliable attack off from this thing because it’ll always be added behind something already in the queue.

It is totally unreliable. You have to wonder sometimes what they are thinking when making such changes that end up breaking a skill completely.

I had some time to play around with my trusty Glyph build in WvW & PvE. These are my more in depth observations:

WvW, roaming: Trying to mirco manage my two Summons got me killed twice when soloing camps, which is pretty rare. The activation of the skills just takes way too much time and disturbs your combos. It also happened that I interrupted the skill activation by trying to queue the next skill too fast. The ice elemental’s heal was not reliable at all, when I had the NPCs balled up and the amount of heal it gave was probably less than I lost while trying to execute those laggy skills. I did much better when I just activated both earth variants before the aggro and used them as meat shields and concentrated on my weapon & utility skills.

In PvE I had some time to observe the AI behaviour a bit more. It takes about 4-5 seconds for an elemental’s skill to execute if the summon is not standing right next to the target (air is a bit faster due to its ranged attack). It goes straight to “off combat cool down” when the summon is not in actual combat (you being in combat or attacking does not work as a trigger or is at least nor reliable). This means you can’t trigger the skill and then engag ethe enemy so it uses the skill as its first attack (like it was possible with the Ranger’s pet AI).

Also, considering the summon lasts 60 seconds, the “ideal” execution looked like this (normal reflexes, after casts etc); some phases could even be 1 or two sec longer:

you summon (1 sec)
you attack to get the summon’s AI thinking about engaging the enemy (2 sec)
summon moves towards enemy (3 sec)
you activate the skill (4 sec)
it takes around 2-3 seconds to execute the skill (so at roughly 6-8 sec into its duration it causes damage, heals, etc)
and goes on a 15 sec recharge ( +15 sec)
the skill has recharged at around 21 sec into its total duration of 60 sec.

Even if you don’t change targets and execute the skill right after recharge, you will not get a third special skill activation out of the summon before its duration runs out after 60 sec, even worse with the 18 sec of the Earth summon.

So, what is the difference to the AI controlled special attack we had before?
You waste a lot of time micro managing the skill, which makes you deal less DPS (you don’t have time for attacks, even auto attacks), your enemies can spot those “breaks” easily in competitive play when they see you activate the glyph, which is highly visible and you break your flow of skills with this unreliable micro management. Also, the skills are not that awesome after all and a weapon bar skill other than skill #1 will have a greater impact on the fight than your summons ability.
I believe that the old AI was not slower in executing the special ability and it did not interfere with any other skill use on the skill bar.

IMHO, there is no other verdict on the changes that in practical use, the players has no benefit from the changes at all and suffers from a lot of effects that make him less effective and more vulnerable.

While I can’t say I like the fact these skills require channels to activate, I disagree wholeheartedly with the observation they’re worse now than they were before. People seem to forget the fact that the water elemental’s ability is a whopping 7K AoE heal. That’s completely bonkers, even if you have to wait a couple of seconds for it to activate.

Even crazier when you’re on comms with teammates in tpvp and you can call out an on-demand 7k heal for them.

Have to say I haven’t bothered with the other elementals just yet in pvp, but why should you?

The cast times on the elemental skills definitely need to be tweaked if they’re intended to be effective. I love the ability to choose when to activate their skills, but the elementals are so unresponsive that it’s pretty much impossible to use them intelligently. The air elemental in particular is way too slow; in order to interrupt an enemy player’s skill, you’d need to cast it 4-5 seconds in advance. A daze really needs to be instant-cast in order to be effective — if I see a warrior’s eviscerate and can daze him using my air elemental, that would be an amazing change — but with the change it’s basically blind luck if you interrupt anything at all. I love the idea behind the change, but in practice the cast times are completely out of whack. Because they’re so unresponsive, this change has basically amounted to your elementals doing the exact same thing as before, only with you having to physically go through a 3/4 second cast time every time they would normally use their skill.
I really hope that Arena Net sees this and addresses it, because the change can be totally wicked awesome and lead to intelligent and skillful play, but instead is just an added inconvenience.

Switch to Guardians. You’ll be much less stressed.

I think parrots do more damages than our elementals…

Gokil.2543:

While I can’t say I like the fact these skills require channels to activate, I disagree wholeheartedly with the observation they’re worse now than they were before. People seem to forget the fact that the water elemental’s ability is a whopping 7K AoE heal. That’s completely bonkers, even if you have to wait a couple of seconds for it to activate.

Even crazier when you’re on comms with teammates in tpvp and you can call out an on-demand 7k heal for them.

I know it seems good, but the elemental takes a very, very long time to actually cast the heal. It is by far the most unresponsive thing I’ve seen in any game, and the huge cast time that the elemental has on the heal doesn’t help either.

If it actually started casting the heal within 3 seconds after commanding it to, it’d be great.

Gokil.2543:

While I can’t say I like the fact these skills require channels to activate, I disagree wholeheartedly with the observation they’re worse now than they were before. People seem to forget the fact that the water elemental’s ability is a whopping 7K AoE heal. That’s completely bonkers, even if you have to wait a couple of seconds for it to activate.

Even crazier when you’re on comms with teammates in tpvp and you can call out an on-demand 7k heal for them.

Have to say I haven’t bothered with the other elementals just yet in pvp, but why should you?

Ele has alot of other heals, we dont really need it that much. Try to use that heal tho, it means that this elemental needs to go for enemy hit it with knockback (which it casts) and then use heal. When enemy is not moving it takes 3-4 sec to bring it on – when moving it will propably die first before even try to cast it.

So after changes – what elite is better for human? Hounds or reaper of grenth (I’m using dd ele). Was thinking about reaper, cause perma poison and chill looks nice.

YACAM.

(yet another clunky anet mechanic; see conjures)

Xillllix.3485:

cheese.4739:

Iriel.9048:

The delay on the elemental actually performing the skill after the elementalist’s command is indeed too much for an effective use in a competitive scenario – especially when the elemental is already attacking the target.

That they have to be in combat is especially important here – there is absolutely no way to get a reliable attack off from this thing because it’ll always be added behind something already in the queue.

It is totally unreliable. You have to wonder sometimes what they are thinking when making such changes that end up breaking a skill completely.

The worst thing is that this comes only a few months after they finally made Ranger pets more than just damage/pull bots, and made their active skills immediate rather than queued. Why could they not apply the same to other summons?
Not only do we have activation time that breaks the flow of our own combos, the summoned elementals usually have pretty long attack sequences and it’s almost impossible to tell when the cast is going to go off. Boo to that.