Guild Wars 2

People always cry over one nerf or two, even when they happen among many other buffs. I still haven’t tested the changes myself, and I’ve heard some things might have stopped working correctly, but in theory it was a good patch.

Relevant Fixes

• Ride the Lightning/ Magnetic Grasp/ Mist Form’s trait – People were begging for it.
• Evasive Arcana – It was (is) a good trait without blast finishers, it was broken with them. Pretty much only used before to abuse on bunkers water fields.
• Dragon’s Tooth – The blast finisher finally makes sense and works well with Flamewall from Focus.

Relevant Buffs

• Ether Renewal – One more worthwhile condition removal effect, especially relevant for D/D or Staff without cantrips/ water investment.
• Conjure buffs! Let’s see how they play out now, and with the fix on Soothing Wave, Frost Bow + Mist Form + Signet of Water might prove to be an alternative to triple cantrip for regeneration builds.

Relevant Nerfs

• Evasive Arcana as mentioned above, which was breaking bunker builds, and Healing Ripple, which was too strong on bunker builds.

Elites

• Tornado’s nerf was weird, possible done by the bug’s dev team instead of the balancing dev team, or something. Lich and Avatar of Melandru got the same changes.
• Anyways, Tornado has always been bad at what it was meant to do, while Fiery Greatsword might actually be something now.

CONCLUSION

• Devs are still priotizing skill changes over trait changes, as has been for the last patches, bug fixes aside.
• Some important bug fixes should frustate us less now.
• Bunker builds were nerfed, as expected;
• Conjure Weapons were buffed, at last. Will those buffs be enough? I don’t know, but if they are, they might have a pretty big effect on elementalist building, especially when it comes to: weapon switching options, damage builds and even bunker/ healing builds. Also, another candidate for the elite slot now.

Bunker builds are still viable, imo. Less so with staff, for sure, but tanky D/D builds didn’t get much healing from blast finishers anyway. The huge support staff offers, making your whole kitten team live forever was too much. But D/D or even S/D can still be very tanky and hold a point for a long time.

I still think evasive arcana is an awesome trait, easily the best dodge trait there is imo.

Yeah, evasive arcana is a good trait even without blast finishers, and I agree bunker builds are still good. Just not overpowered-good.

So many things getting “fixed” and bugging out in actual gameplay leaves elementalists wondering if the developers actually test them out against real live targets. Really, I’m wondering which magical builds of awesomesauce they are balancing the elementalist around.

Elementalist is at the point where ALL builds need specific traits in specific traitlines or else the build is inherently bad. The points being spent are very tight and there’s little flexibility as a result of this.

Now contrast this with Mesmer or Thief. The points are fairly loose, going deep in traitlines as a Mesmer is optional because for almost every build there’s only a very few deep traits that are specific to particular builds. Thief is so loose it’s possible to throw points out at random and build around that with appropriate gear, weapons and traits.

Yeehaw Conjure buffs! Man, I can’t wait to still not use them. This patch nerfed our best (only good?) Grandmaster trait into the ground. Other than the sorely needed RTL fix nothing good has come out of it. While I wasn’t expecting any massive buffs, I certainly wasn’t expecting one of our only viable specs to be nerfed so harshly.

Overall……..pretty disappointed patch from just looking at it. Granted, I have yet to finish downloading and test it but just looking at it…..

RTL fix – Good
Evasive Arcana nerf – pretty huge, big nerf to staff, semi-nerf to D/D (this change would be okay except they didn’t give much in the way of replacing it, or any buffs to offset the change)
Conjured weapons – Buffed, but I still dont think anyone will use these, it’s just a death trap to give up your ability to swap attunements, maybe in pve they’ll be more useful now
Healing Ripple – Eh, okay nerf
Tornado nerf – LOL, what were they thinking here? Tornado needs a BUFF not a nerf wtf

Pretty disappointed. Runes of earth and boon runes also got nerfed which sucks. Overall the nerfs wouldn’t have been so bad if they had done something to offset them, but there’s like nothing. The one positive change would be RTL which I have yet to test.

For a huge patch like this that’s making pretty big changes, not a good start. There are still so many useless traits etc that needed to be fixed if they were going to nerf evasive arcana and the runes.

I’m quite disappointed that they didn’t fix the Windborne Dagger trait in Arcana. The 15% additional movement speed while wielding a dagger still don’t work. Doesn’t look like such a tough fix to me.

Magnetic grasp was still bugged the one time i tried it in PVE, Dragon’s tooth isn’t a combo finisher now, instead of fixing skills as they are supposed to be, they changed the tooltips as they are now, feels pretty bad, man.

Testing Ride The Lightning tonight and it’s still buggy. It rooted me to the spot in front of a tower and it still turns me into a static ball about 1 foot away from my target :P

Magnetic Grasp does seem to be more accurate, but would need to test further with it. I can live with the Evasive Arcana changes, just won’t be able to stack additional might like I used too

I messed around with the conjures and they still feel lacklustre, plus as others have stated, your kind of nerfing yourself by using a conjure anyway. The only use I’ve found for conjures is giving lighting hammer or greatsword to classes that can actually deal damage, like thieves or wars. Maybe that was the intention with conjures from the start?

And as for Tornado…well god knows what they were thinking with that one :P

On the flip side, thieves (supposedly nerfed) are still uber powerful. I duo WvW with a thief friend, he STILL kills people before I’m even in range, and no I’m not exaggerating :P He just had to adapt his build slightly. So that’s good.

WhimsicalPacifist.2943:

So many things getting “fixed” and bugging out in actual gameplay leaves elementalists wondering if the developers actually test them out against real live targets. Really, I’m wondering which magical builds of awesomesauce they are balancing the elementalist around.

Elementalist is at the point where ALL builds need specific traits in specific traitlines or else the build is inherently bad. The points being spent are very tight and there’s little flexibility as a result of this.

Now contrast this with Mesmer or Thief. The points are fairly loose, going deep in traitlines as a Mesmer is optional because for almost every build there’s only a very few deep traits that are specific to particular builds. Thief is so loose it’s possible to throw points out at random and build around that with appropriate gear, weapons and traits.

The points in a mesmer build aren’t loose at all. Every build needs several very specific traits. While there are variations on these builds, these become separate builds. Shatter builds need at least 20 in dueling and 10 in domination to be effective at all. Every build needs 5 in illusions. To be a true shatter build, you need to go 30 into illusions for illusionary persona. Mantra builds require 30 in domination and if you want damage, 30 in dueling as well. Etc.

can anyone clarify how Dragon’s Tooth was fixed? I tried so that the spell lands within the combofield but i don’t see it working? i might be doing it wrong

dom.2534:

Yeehaw Conjure buffs! Man, I can’t wait to still not use them. This patch nerfed our best (only good?) Grandmaster trait into the ground. Other than the sorely needed RTL fix nothing good has come out of it. While I wasn’t expecting any massive buffs, I certainly wasn’t expecting one of our only viable specs to be nerfed so harshly.

Conjures are now slightly better than having no weapon equipped at all. Yay.

kulugo.7549:

can anyone clarify how Dragon’s Tooth was fixed? I tried so that the spell lands within the combofield but i don’t see it working? i might be doing it wrong

As far as anyone can tell, it wasn’t. That part of the patch was either a lie, or not tested internally at all.

Conjure as a mechanic just makes no sense at all. You lose all your skills on other attunements for a weapon that has both a charge and a time limit. It’d be one thing if it simply replaced the skills for a particular atunement (Fiery Greatsword replaces fire skills, Lightning Hammer replaces air skills) but as it stands now, conjure weapons are too clunky to be worth a spot on the utility bar. You give up 21 skills to gain 5 mediocre skills. Doesn’t seem like much of a fair trade.

DiogoSilva.7089:

• Evasive Arcana – It was (is) a good trait without blast finishers, it was broken with them. Pretty much only used before to abuse on bunkers water fields.

So my D/D build that was using Evasive Arcana to get might stacks up on my party just wasn’t being used huh? If bunkers were the problem, why on earth was the trait not just nerfed for PvP?

And for the record, the trait is dreadful without blast finishers. The only useful one is in water attunement; the other three were only good for setting off blast finishers.

Overall, this patch was a massive disappointment. Elementalists desperately needed a complete overhaul of our underwater skills, not to mention our worthless elites, and neither was touched. Worse still, Arenanet seems to think that giving conjured weapons some extra stats will make them worthwhile. Are they just straight up delusional at this point? They might be thinking “Hey, engies use their kits right, so conjured weapons are just the same!” Except engie kits don’t have a cooldown, or charges, can be specced to be actually useful, and their base weapons are terrible.

But I guess when you have two guys working on balance, we really shouldn’t expect much.

I have a question regarding tornado. Why for all that is holy and mighty does Tornado Elite skill have 22 and a half seconds of Stability buff when it only lasts for 14-15 seconds? What was the purpose for this? Was this part missed in the “tooltip fixes” patch? Why?!?

No matter what people will think about it, these are good patch notes in my opinion and noone will convince me otherwise yust because they cant abuse their bugs anymore.

And i have no clue Gall, at armor of earth it also used to say the protection and stability lasted 11 seconds and then armor of earth stopped after 8 seconds, removing the boons.

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

And i have no clue Gall, at armor of earth it also used to say the protection and stability lasted 11 seconds and then armor of earth stopped after 8 seconds, removing the boons.

They fixed that. It was in the patch notes.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

And i have no clue Gall, at armor of earth it also used to say the protection and stability lasted 11 seconds and then armor of earth stopped after 8 seconds, removing the boons.

They fixed that. It was in the patch notes.

And by fixed, you mean nerfed the actual skills instead of putting them where the tooltip said they were supposed to be.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Yeah, evasive arcana is a good trait even without blast finishers, and I agree bunker builds are still good. Just not overpowered-good.

You’re missing the fact that whatever you dodge will not get hit because you’ve just dodged out of range.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Warmage Timeraider.5861:

And i have no clue Gall, at armor of earth it also used to say the protection and stability lasted 11 seconds and then armor of earth stopped after 8 seconds, removing the boons.

They fixed that. It was in the patch notes.

And by fixed, you mean nerfed the actual skills instead of putting them where the tooltip said they were supposed to be.

Blame the tooltip encoders, I say!
They are the reason for all of these misunderstood nerfs to the ground!!

On a side note, Tornado’s longer stability duration compared to the transformation’s actual duration still annoys me.