Guild Wars 2

As quick note before I get into it: I’m posting my point of view here, I’m not saying you are wrong, or a bad player, or any of that. If you disagree, I’d love to hear a rational argument for your opinion.

I’ve seen many people say something to the effect of “Yes, I think if played correctly, elementalists can be great, but they still need to be fixed because of how hard it is to play them well compared to other classes.”

From my perspective, any given class should be considered for a fix based only on one question: What is their potential to compete with the other classes?

It seems to me that there are plenty of people showing how amazing this class can be. Therefore, any fix at all (which would presumably improve power or survivability or what have you by tweaking a few skills) has to consider the best elementalists as the baseline for class potential and then add to that. It seems to me that doing that would likely lead to justified complaints from the rest of the classes that elementalists are OP. What happens next is you get an influx of people rolling elementalists, most of which do it because of how easy they have become, and you get rapid decline in respect for elementalists who are really, really good, if that is something that matters to you. I tend think everyone wants to be proud of playing their class well, so this would hut the gameplay experience, in my opinion.

It may be easy to do well with a warrior or a thief, and there are certainly players of those classes that know more about their class and play better than others, but from what I’ve seen, elementalists who know what they’re doing certainly hold their own against these players.

So from my perspective, when I see requests to fix elementalists, all I really see are requests to remove the need to learn the class well in order to compete.

Thoughts?

Execellent explanation! Which describe entirely my fears.

I’m pretty sure that GW1 veterans remember how ele players were regarded in general: “noobs profession”, regardless of your level of skill you’d still be regarded as noob for simply playing an ele.

In every discussion both in game and outside the game, your opinion was never appreciated simply for being an ele player, comments like :" lol blind spammer scrub"-" knockdown nab"-" invoke rankless nab spammer" and so on.

People have got all the rights to pick a profession which does not require big efforts to have fun with, that’s a legitimate reason, but we must always look at both sides of the coin.

When you play an “easy” profession, generally in people minds you automatically become a “scrub-noob” etc etc; believe me it’s an terrible feeling, everytime you try to talk about PvP you get laughed at to say the least, this is what happened in GW1 as ele player.

I really want the ele in GW2 to stay as it is, of course minus some obvious balance issues ( elites, glyphs, fire traits) and major bug fixes( RTL-magnetic grasp-mist form), but pls Anet do no dumb down the ele for the sake of players that in all honesty they could simply switch to an “easier” profession

Arheundel.6451:

Execellent explanation! Which describe entirely my fears.

I’m pretty sure that GW1 veterans remember how ele players were regarded in general: “noobs profession”, regardless of your level of skill you’d still be regarded as noob for simply playing an ele.

In every discussion both in game and outside the game, your opinion was never appreciated simply for being an ele player, comments like :" lol blind spammer scrub"-" knockdown nab"-" invoke rankless nab spammer" and so on.

People have got all the rights to pick a profession which does not require big efforts to have fun with, that’s a legitimate reason, but we must always look at both sides of the coin.

When you play an “easy” profession, generally in people minds you automatically become a “scrub-noob” etc etc; believe me it’s an terrible feeling, everytime you try to talk about PvP you get laughed at to say the least, this is what happened in GW1 as ele player.

I really want the ele in GW2 to stay as it is, of course minus some obvious balance issues ( elites, glyphs, fire traits) and major bug fixes( RTL-magnetic grasp-mist form), but pls Anet do no dumb down the ele for the sake of players that in all honesty they could simply switch to an “easier” profession

Ive played guild wars 1 for over 4 years and dont recall ever be called a noob ele, furthermore eles simply annihilated pve back then with the proper builds, there were so many builds u could choose from besides sf/ms u could almost never get bored of the class and be efficient like no other.

And that was with splitted attunements, theres also not 2 sides of the coin, the gw2 elementalist description is exactly the same as gw1 elementalist description so the 2 side of the coins goes down the toilet, i much rather have creative elementalists classes which were actually viable for decent damage and good heal in water, great dps in fire, great protection abilities in earth and sick 1 target dps in air, right now u have the same boring profession across the game using same weapons and skills, adding nothing to creativity or build choices, thats why u get 20 clunky spells and other classes achieves the same and better with only 5.

This is not an elementalist, this is more like a paragon, the only way i would agree for this to be a class full of bloatware and make u take as much efficiency of that bloatware as is possible for a human was to call it a different name or simply add a class called “elementalist” and call the current one BloatWare Mage or Elemental Paragon as this one clearly isnt an ele.

The concept is fun, but i dont see anet doing much effort to make this class viable to play, thats why many ppl suggest to remove these attunement stuff and split them up, its the easiest way for ANET to balance the class because currently, with all its versatility, with all its 20 magnificent skills, in spvp u are still forced to go melee or die in 1vs1. If this is what u think that gw1 elementalist was all about then im sorry im in the wrong forum.

Having said all that, i still use my ele in pve, mainly CoE, i dont find the class boring but i do fint it borked when i have skills that block for 5 seconds only 3 attacks and then it explodes which recharges in 60 seconds basically telling u “this is not a good skill to use for solo crowd killing”, or having lightning flash with 45 seconds recharge time while the mesmer equivalent blink is only 30 seconds, or having stupid traits like “u get more damage while in water”, “your fire spells add might for x seconds when u are casting”, “bleeds u apply last longer” and other random crap like that, how the heck can u convince me this is a versatile and fine class when the trait system itself is forcing you to stick to an attunement more than others?

Elementalist has one of the best WvWvW ranged AoE with staff. Elementalist has one of the best burst dps for WvWvW with dual daggers, while having great survivability and escaping. Elementalist can do exellent support with aura builds and correct use of water skills and arcane tree, without gearing full to support. And prolly can push out the highest healing on a larger time scale (shout heals have longer cooldowns than water attunument and dodge heals from arcane, + water fields and blast), no class can heal as much, consistently.

It’s way kittening harder to play yea, but if any of the complexity was removed, I would be so pissed off.

Trait system does not, DOES NOT, want you to stick to one attunument, and the class is not designed for you to do so.

Elementalist is amazing class, rewards multitasking, coordination and skillz. Works as healer, dps, aoe, buffer, CC, everything.

u rly consider dual dagger one of the best burst dps? my engineer with a rifle can outperform ur dual dagger at ease, the only thing u got right was the healing.
And yes trait system DOES want you to stick to 1 attunement, earth and arcana possibly beying the only ones which u can make use of it in other attunements aswell, fire, water, air all of that has numerous traits which only supports themselves.
You rly need to play other classes…

Facepunch,

I think there are two camps of the “ele needs fix” crowd, and the two camps are worth distinguishing.

Camp One (where I fall):

- Fix obvious things like self-cc RTL and the Earth Grab spell. Self-cc is just silly.

- Revisit / Repair / reimagine borked traits (Cleansing Flame, Lingering Elements, Vigorous Scepter, Windborne Dagger, on and on and on…) and traits that run contrary to attunement swapping. They don’t need to be OP, they should just, you know, do something. Make it hard for me to choose which flavor of awesomesauce I want on my ice cream. Right now there might be 57 flavors, but too many of them are flavors like “Dung Beetle.”

-Have consistency in abilities like auras in different attunements.

-Update tooltips so that they are accurate (Healing Rain..supposed to be 4 seconds or 9? )…..

- Speed up animation times and targeting issues.

These kinds of fixes. This is your crowd that probably gets it but is frustrated by having skills/traits that are never worth picking and using.

+ perhaps a little more HP (debatable).

Camp Two: Everything listed above + way more damage +the HP + burst / etc. = Godmode plz. This is your L2P crowd.

With perhaps the exception of the boost in HP, I find it hard to believe that anyone could complain with players asking for bug fixes (camp one).

If fixing bugs and tweaking nothing else makes us Godmode, that’s pretty messed up.

On a side note, anyone else feel like the animation times were meant to mitigate big damage that is no longer there? Dragon’s Tooth = ouch, but if it hangs long enough; no one can complain if they do get hit. Eruption/Churning Earth, same thing. Meteor Shower = could be awesome, but long load time and no splash so it won’t actually hit much.

I didn’t play beta. I hear damage was higher. Seems they nerfed the damage but didn’t fix the cast times / splash radius to put things back in line. I would love to see meteor shower consistently hitting even if it was for smaller numbers vs. now: Cast meteor shower, watch auto attack hit more often on same mob. Cry. Right now frost bow #4 is more reliable.

Fix, don’t godmode. Fix!

elementalist should not be boosted, nor made easier. Other classes should be made harder.

PlatypusRex.3428:

I didn’t play beta. I hear damage was higher. Seems they nerfed the damage but didn’t fix the cast times / splash radius to put things back in line.

This is exactly right the nerf was a knee jerk response without a really considered solution and whats annoying is that they don’t seem to regard it as such.

I’m definitely in camp 1 and then we can at least get a better idea of where the class is.

IMHO class changes should be iterative not big bang, unfortunately anet doesn’t seem to have the same opinion.

Well platypus i agree with what youve said but i see it very unlikely to happen, i dont see how dealing 5k damage in a dragontooth with its current casting time could ever be considered overpowered, no man with brains and a pair of speakers could ignore its sound or its aoe warning, its just not possible to not notice it unless ure completely distracted, the damage it currently does is a freaking joke, u dont even have to dodge or use swiftness u can literally walk away from it! and MS is a freaking joke, i like it in pve because mobs arent coded to avoid it, in spvp u can randomly kill 1 or 2 guys if a bunch of them hit in the same place more than twice very fast, its simply an unreliable spell and has no business existing ingame this isnt lottery, u get enough of that with critical chance now u get it with dealing damage or not dealing at all too, and then u have some pros complaining i died with ms in 4 hits cause i got hit by it too much nerf plz! so the compensation of high damage because its a random spell is nerfed so it has no compensation at all! makes sense?

Ele’s need bug fixes, I really, really, really hope aNet doesn’t dumb down the profession because a group of people are too lazy to learn the class. You can see where they are coming from, for example. Someone creates a warrior, runs around pressing 1111111,22222222,1111111 and not really worrying about much. They then roll and elementalist and try and do the same thing.

Obviously it doesn’t work and they end up here whining. You can kind of see their point, when you look at how simple other professions are, but the “complexity” (I wouldn’t even call it complex) is what defines the profession.

Sabull.5670:

elementalist should not be boosted, nor made easier. Other classes should be made harder.

this is exactly my opinion!

The class is in a really really good spot. It needs a lot of bug fixes, but that’s true for every class. It could use some tweaks to certain weapon abilities, but nothing major. It has 3 extremely viable weapon sets, and a wide range of useful Utilities.

It’s harder to play than most other classes (by a wide margin) which is why a lot of people think it’s bad. Personally, I think it’s the perfect baseline for balance. Classes which are significantly stronger than Ele should be toned down (Guardian, Mesmer, Thief) and classes which are significantly weaker should be brought up (Ranger).

I enjoy the difficulty of the class, makes choosing what to use and when much more fun then just warrior axe 5, eviscerate, berserker stance, flurry. I would like some skills to be fixed though, dragons tooth, not worth using / situational at best (I mainly use it for blast finisher). RTL, zomg, you moved, enjoy some free hits on me while I can’t do much else.