Guild Wars 2

I guess the leaked patch notes were real.

So we pretty much have to wait until november for any real changes to the elementalist.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/October-15th-balance-skills-updates-preview/first#post2832857

Son I am extremely disappoint.
Let’s see what happens to Unsteady Ground.

Definitely disappointing, but not surprised. Do hope there is more soon.

Staff Ele still wants a bit more. Though I am curious about the changes occurring I suppose. Water buff is a little baffling. I used it perfectly fine before, not sure it needed a “buff.”

hopefully the unsteady ground buff is good…cuz staff ele needs a lot more love than increasing the radius on geyser. Also conjure weapons are only useful if you like spamming 1 with lightning hammer.

This also confirms that the leaked patch notes are incomplete.

DiogoSilva.7089:

This also confirms that the leaked patch notes are incomplete.

This confirms that most of the things on the patch notes were right, it was also inferred by jon, that the only thing missing from the patch notes were buffs for the shield conjure weapon.

DiogoSilva.7089:

This also confirms that the leaked patch notes are incomplete.

This.

It seemed like a small list considering everything Anet has said to try and patch things up a bit since PAX ended.

Why do they bother with conjures.

I am happy to see that they are doing a little more than advertised originally, I still don’t feel it will be enough for the ele. They aren’t actually addressing the most important issues (very poor survivability/being stuck in water/arcana and poor damage) I am also bitter to see the buffs guardians get in their utilities: they already support and survive better w/o them, and then they are improving their utilities even more than our crappy cantrips (which are our best for the most part). I guess that is the benefit of being a pet class as opposed to the red-headed step-child.

Regardless, progress is a good thing and it will take them a while to buff ele out of the hole it is in right now. This is a step in the right direction, but isn’t going to nearly get us there.

Really need to lower cast times on #2 staff skills for Water/Air/Earth, the least they could do.

^ They also don’t want to go back and re-revise previous nerfs and admit they were too much. The thing is, most people understand that balancing is like trying to do maintenance on a moving car. If they have to go back and undo a mistake, or decrease the extent of a nerf, it is better to do that than try to re-create the class into something else entirely.

People understand and respect when you say “ok, that was too far, maybe you can have this toy back.” (I’m looking at you RTL)

Vissarion.6509:

Why do they bother with conjures.

Because if you haven’t figured it out by now Arena Net does all their balancing and all their game play changes based entirely on in game metrics.

So lets say there were a grand total of around million hours played on the Elementalist for all characters of all levels over the course of 60 days. Of those million hours, only 5% of the time X skill was actively slotted or Y trait was selected. They can break it down even further and look at what level ranges the skill was used in (such as maybe 4% of that time was 1-40 but after 40 it only saw 1% usage) and other interesting metrics.

Once that have that data they they can then do trending on that data (this is very common for any user based software development) to determine if anything needs to be taken care of looked at.

Their first passes probably lead them to the conclusion that the Cantrip utilities were too strong which eclipsed these other utilities. However even after nerfing Cantrips by removing their stunbreakers and other various nerfs over time Cantrips are likely still dominating the usage. Anyone who actually plays an Elementalist knows this is because Cantrips provide the maximum amount of utility/survivability on a class that already has the lowest HP and lowest armor (significantly) and you won’t see much deviation out of them until they address the lowest HP and lowest armor.

Since that failed miserably (non cantrip builds are still pretty rare) and people still aren’t using Conjures they probably think that by boosting Conjures up that it might drive usage instead. Result is Conjures get a boost to drive usage

The TL;DR here is that all the forum whining is pointless. Users (us) lie and while we might be crying one thing on the forums we’re doing another actual thing in game. I laugh at all the RTL crying because those people are still probably spamming it on cool down driving usage making them think it’s 100% okay. Unfortunately they seem content to keep putting band aids on our broken arm hoping that it’ll accomplish something.