Guild Wars 2

Is Meteor Shower working as intended?

Here’s why I’m asking this: It seems that the damage it deals is inconsistent with the enemies’ armor. Last night while in WvW with my guild, we were all sharing the damage we were taking from MS.

I took 3.5-4.5k dmg from each meteor at 2.8k armor.
Thief with 2k armor took about 3.5-4k consistently.
Guardian with 3.3k armor consistently 4k+, even got hit by a 5.2k.

Shouldn’t that thief be getting hit for 7k+ if the 4k+ on a full tank guardian is working as intended? It almost seems like MS is armor-ignoring now or something.

No vulnerability stacks involved btw.

Yes, I’m aware of the Tornado combo. My point still stands. I highly doubt every single meteor we got hit by was combo’d with Tornado. (Cheesiest combo in the game award goes right here btw)

When we can tank 3 superior arrow carts and get melted by 1 meteor shower, you know something’s wrong. Plus with the new improved radius for each meteor it’s quite possible to get hit by 2-3 in a row. So that would be 15k on a 3k+ armor Guardian.

This isn’t an “OMG NERF MS” post. I could be wrong and MS is working fine. If it’s working as intended I’ll just man up and deal with it. But it’s not only that the damage is high. I understand that it’s a channeling skill that doesn’t allow you to move and it’s supposed to be devastating. All I’m saying is that the damage seems odd and inconsistent. I hope Anet can shed some light on this.

Were those meteors all from the same person? I’m assuming those were mag’s eles, they don’t all run the same build especially since some are just pugs copying the ones from the actual guild groups. Some of them fight and live in full glass, others melt while wearing ptv.

(also 4k on squish thief probably wasn’t a tornado :P)

Player Character.9467:

Were those meteors all from the same person? I’m assuming those were mag’s eles, they don’t all run the same build especially since some are just pugs copying the ones from the actual guild groups. Some of them fight and live in full glass, others melt while wearing ptv.

(also 4k on squish thief probably wasn’t a tornado :P)

(5k+ on a full tank guardian probably was :P)

Exactly my point. 4k on the thief seems way too low when you look at the other numbers on tankier players. It could be Eles with different gear, but then why haven’t I noticed MS like that before the patch last week? I have fought a LOT of servers and guilds that used MS on me several times over including Mag. Never seen this much inconsistency. Idk, could just be the new radius improvement. I’m just askin questions.

Well if you start taking like 500-1k hits, that’ll be my non-80 ele. Plz clump for powerlvling

Can’t say I have seen any variance that I could not explain.

The dmg is always very varied depending on many variables, because of Tornado, wide area it hits (many different type of targets), food proccing 200 power, if I’m in group with guardians I got 20 might, if with staff eles and necros I got 3 might. 20% boost hitting at 33% health, bloodlust, orbs, guard killer and staff eles often have high crit damage (or should have).

One normal/unlucky meteor dropping on yourhead is no insta wiper. It’s modifier is the same as Air #2, and almost same as Eruption.
But that
1.3*1000*2000/2600 = 1000 damage tickle hit from a freshly entered Ele turns into a
1.2*1.3*1000*4800/2600*2.3 = 6600 wiper crit from the same guy with 10 might and all the WvW and food passives, with 80% crit dmg, against a 33% hp target.
And they only go up from that.
I know I’m just pulling numbers here but my point is the damage can vary alot because of the long channel, buffs change.

It could be weakness. I hate getting hit by weakness in the middle of my channel and then see glancing pop up all over my screen instead of 5000’s.

Unless you were clumped together, then you were hit by different meteors. In that time frame, the caster could’ve gained might, used tornado, got hit with weakness, etc.

With more hits from the radius boost, you’re seeing more numbers in a short time frame allowing RNG, among other time related or random variables, to show significant variance instead of only getting hit by 1 or 2 meteors per channel.

I don’t know, just offering some thoughts in addition to the above.

OP: That is weird. I actually thought they may have stealth nerfed Meteor Shower like they did with Arcane skills last patch. Mine seem to hit from 2k-4k where a couple months ago there were more of the occasional 5k, 6k hits.
I was thinking it could just be how many Warriors and heavies are out there these days, but not sure, hope it wasn’t a nerf .

OP,
I have enough characters to do damage testing between classes. A couple of months ago it felt like the ele was taking far too much damage for 3.2k armor, which was my spec at the time. I did damage testing in PvP practice area, WvW and PvE. I can tell you with conclusive evidence that there is secret code that manages damage, and that, at least for the ele, armor does not mitigate like it should. That sucks because ele already has the worst survivability.

Oh, btw, my untraited guardian base armor (2.2k if I remember right) had the best damage mitigation efficiency. It worked better than my ele at 3.2k. I was shocked and disappointed, but I was glad my earlier impression was validated.

ImProVocateur.5189:

OP,
I have enough characters to do damage testing between classes. A couple of months ago it felt like the ele was taking far too much damage for 3.2k armor, which was my spec at the time. I did damage testing in PvP practice area, WvW and PvE. I can tell you with conclusive evidence that there is secret code that manages damage, and that, at least for the ele, armor does not mitigate like it should. That sucks because ele already has the worst survivability.

Oh, btw, my untraited guardian base armor (2.2k if I remember right) had the best damage mitigation efficiency. It worked better than my ele at 3.2k. I was shocked and disappointed, but I was glad my earlier impression was validated.

Could you share these conclusive evidences please? Contact me ingame or mayby private message? I would definetly appreciate knowing if they have changed skills without telling.

tehfoks.5120:

(Cheesiest combo in the game award goes right here btw)

How so?

The ele locks himself out of all of his skills in order to super charge Meteor Shower once every 2.5 minutes. Necros do the same thing, except they’re actually really powerful in lich form in addition to super charging their well damage.

If enemies are smart enough to walk 360 units (takes ~1 second) away from the central point, they can avoid all of the damage and the ele just wasted two big cooldowns. It has a nice little niche for wiping the brain dead hammer trains, or holding some choke points, but otherwise you’re mostly going to hit a lot of air.

@OP did you take into account +10% dmg for burning foes and +20% dmg when below 33% hp?
If the guard was burning and had 33%- hp he could get more damage than non burning full hp thief.

>When we can tank 3 superior arrow carts and get
> melted by 1 meteor shower, you know something’s wrong.

no, it is perfectly OK. In pvp/wvw MS is area denilal skill – it only kills ppl who are dumb enought to stay in meteors. This skill is not susposed to be passively tanked.

Sabull.5670,
I would like to, but two things:
1. I did not make video of the tests.
2. I trashed or traded all of the Ele gear after the testing.

I can also tell you that the hidden math was adjusted favorably for the Ele a month later, but the Ele still was not getting the proper amount of damage mitigation. If you want to test after this last patch, then load up on a combo of Knight’s and Cavalier’s gear, max Earth attunement, and pick the traits that increase toughness. Then, untrait your melee classes, and swap armor sets to get an objective set of data. You will need to devote a weekend to this. Remember to use a variety of NPCs and vPlayer classes, and make sure the same abilities are being compared (that have identical buffs).

^I call bs, but your claims would be really easy to test.

Just have an ele and some other classes make their armor levels equal and get hit by the same source of damage at the same time. You can either do this in wvw with a friend from an enemy server, or just stand around in a trash mobs aoe.

Either way, you can easily compare the damage clicks. No need to waste a whole weekend.

Being the one that has started the Elementalist/caster initiative in Mag i’m glad that we have found a decent counter to a hammer train that isn’t another hammer train.

Does it matter? Ele’s are by far the weakest class in the game. Who cares what damage they do with some easily avoidable staff ability.

Navzar.2938:

^I call bs, but your claims would be really easy to test.

Just have an ele and some other classes make their armor levels equal and get hit by the same source of damage at the same time. You can either do this in wvw with a friend from an enemy server, or just stand around in a trash mobs aoe.

Either way, you can easily compare the damage clicks. No need to waste a whole weekend.

Structures don’t have damage ranges so this can be easily tested on a Flame Jet in AC exp.

You can go to gw2dungeons.net, put up your stats and WvW bonus, search for “Flame Jet” and see if the damage matches. I will double-check this works properly when I get home.

Grove.2835:

OP: That is weird. I actually thought they may have stealth nerfed Meteor Shower like they did with Arcane skills last patch. Mine seem to hit from 2k-4k where a couple months ago there were more of the occasional 5k, 6k hits.
I was thinking it could just be how many Warriors and heavies are out there these days, but not sure, hope it wasn’t a nerf .

I noticed that too. I made this Ele a year ago. Full berserker 30/20/0/0/20 and when I first started playing WvW, I remember critting regularly for 5k to 6k on a meteor hit. I retired my Ele to play my warrior and guardian, and only recently came back to my Ele about 2 months ago. Now my meteor hits are critting around 3k.

Now, you may theorize that back then, more people were upleveled and running in zerker gear, and thus my meteor shower did more damage than it does now. But I also recall that my meteor hits were hitting for at least 4k on veteran guards.

I’m really curious too, but then, I don’t have enough data to make a claim. So its all ¯\(?)/¯

ImProVocateur.5189:

I can tell you with conclusive evidence that there is secret code that manages damage,

I somehow always suspected the same, both because my Elementalist -even when specced to be VERY tanky – goes down way faster than my, say, bursty Mesmer in similar situations, and also because other classes skills are more effective in reducing foe’s HP (at the time I talked about “damage modifier”

In one of my latest videos, one single MS bubble crits on a foe for over 9.000 HP. Where the average crit is 6/7k with same exact stats, gear, food ecc, how can it vary that much? Could it be related to the radius of the sphere? (dunno, I am just theorycrafting here) it would be cool to have an official answer indeed.

Grevender.9235:

In one of my latest videos, one single MS bubble crits on a foe for over 9.000 HP. Where the average crit is 6/7k with same exact stats, gear, food ecc, how can it vary that much? Could it be related to the radius of the sphere? (dunno, I am just theorycrafting here) it would be cool to have an official answer indeed.

because 9k was on some1 squishier than the 6/7k ones.

How does damage from MS compare to Hundred Blades? Not sure what everyone else is getting but with my runes and traits I hit about 3k, 5k, 7500, 8500 damage on HB. I also play exclusively staff as an Elementalist and hardly think it hits hard enough. The only pro to this spell is if you can get new pvp baddies to stand in the middle of the shower during the entire channel without getting interrupted. Good luck with that unless they have a bad video card that doesn’t show the shower….and good luck getting the entire spell off. I think 1/10 times you can complete channeling. Most times is instant interrupt/CC unless youre casting from a rooftop while enemy team is busy fighting your allies.

Elementalist is a joke in comparison to other classes, its not even up for debate. I play them all and have zero bias towards one profession. They have very cool particle effects and mediocre damage. That being said every other class can dish out equal or better abilities. They do not shine whatsoever. I will add that I doubt this gets fixed and also that if you queried the quantity of classes played you would also get an idea of which were most powerful and weak. As I am sure you know, most players especially new ones get a rush out of easy 1-2-3 macro combos that will destroy an opponent fast. They try every class and/or read the forums to see which profession is favored in this regard and then they make that their “main”.

Having played them all, MS is nothing close to fun in comparison to other abilities in the game. Sure there are people that can do decent on this profession but that’s not apples to apples comparison since they are stomping inexperienced players. Also, just because you CAN solo an opponent doesn’t make it as easy as if you were using another profession. I can kill someone with a spoon but a gun would be faster and quicker.

P.S. – If you are wondering I currently have most experience on Guardian, Mesmer so have no reason to defend Elementalist. I actually stopped playing it when many other players did also. If you missed this mass departure, perhaps you should cover the entire Elementalist threads on the forums to discover why.

Yes, It’s annoying to get hit by anything close to high damage when all you want to do is faceroll an entire team and keep 100 percent health. I assure you that Elementalists are hardly a threat and if they were, I would be more concerned with Air abilities than pathetic MS. No decent player will get hit by MS they just evade out of it. Don’t stand in burning rings, MS, poison clouds etc…just don’t…

Reveille.8397:

How does damage from MS compare to Hundred Blades? Not sure what everyone else is getting but with my runes and traits I hit about 3k, 5k, 7500, 8500 damage on HB.

Well that makes no sense considering HB is (a) 9 hits, and (b) the first 8 are all for the same damage and the 9th is for double (and takes twice as long to happen).

The reason is probably due to different gear. The guardian that you hit probably has no toughness or little toughness. The more toughness the lesser damage you receive. But it’s really hard to tell. Why don’t you test it on mist using steady staff. You can see the damage difference to golem that has heavy, medium and light armor.

FYI: light, medium and heavy golem in the mist has 2000, 2200 and 2600 armor respectively