Guild Wars 2

Overall I’m liking the new earth shield. Despite the general issues discussed at length on these forums regarding cooldowns and cast times etc, the weapon itself it much improved.

The auto attack certainly does more damage than it used to, though—hope I’m not alone on this—the animation seems very clunky, uncoordinated, and easily disrupted if your target moves out of range. Without staring intently at my toon, I have a tough time telling if I’m hitting or not. Now, this was in mad king realm, so my video card might have been having a heart attack, but something about my little Asura flying in the air while hitting made it seem…off. It seems very slow.

1. is cool. I like having a block and the damage return isn’t too bad. I like that it’s mobile.

1. is improved w/ multiple targets possible.

1. is vastly improved. mobility much appreciated.

1. was improved for cooldown I believe, but I still wish I could move while casting.

Now just make earth shield instacast and a stunbreaker on cast and earth shield FTW.

All observations/judgments made for PvE. Maybe this has use in point holding in Pvp, but I pretend no expertise on that front.

It’s like a mix of 2 extreme swords (warrior + ranger). So on 1 hand you got the bleed → bleed → cripple from the warrior, and on the other you have the leap on auto that prevents evasion from the ranger.

Leap on auto is the deal breaker.

I wish we got torment instead of bleed on either 1 or 2 and the channel on 2 is almost unrecognizable and feels like it has a delay. All the conjures are looking pretty good but i’m not terribly excited about using them just yet, there are still things they can do to make conjures in general more welcoming to rely on that people have been posting almost daily that I have yet to see even acknowledged.

I have wanted to create a thread about the clunkiness of it since the update. While I like what it has become, there are some big issues attached. I have tested it on dummies, PvP npcs and in hot join.

Skill 1: The auto attacks are very clunky and odd. The worst is the second of the three attacks that provides a tiny dash which doesn’t seem to connect on immobile targets. Like OP, I have a tough time telling what is happening and the auto attacks are generally VERY slow. 3/4 of a second per hit is too slow with a short range weapon, imho, especially for a squishy ele. The attacks should be quicker and more fluid, so you can actually see and feel that it connects. Currently it makes me cringe using.

Skill 2: Works, except you can’t always tell whether you blocked something or not. It is lacking an animation to tell you what happened. Of course you can see if the bleeding applied is increased, but that isn’t how it should be. If that got fixed, you can switch to other skills, knowing you didn’t waste a block.

Skill 3: Works fine for the most part. What I mean is that it works best if you travel the entire distance and hit your target. If the target is standing close, it has a very odd delay where you hover over the ground in your charge animation, making it way to easy to dodge/block. For a close quarters weapon, it’s a rather big annoyance.

Skill 4: The pull effect works fine, or at least lets you pull someone towards you, although often only some of the way.

Skill 5: No problems with this one.

Definitely a big improvement, needs some work on the fluidity, torment is a good idea, punishing targets that move away from you as a “tank” is always thematically good.

Now needs a smoothness pass like the other spells got. The leap on auto should really be in the tooltip… I was very confused. Does seem designed to work with D/F

Leap on auto DOES NOT WORK. The ranger had over a year to show this.

I love it…it’s now one of the best utilities for ele, hands down..a kittening fine job from the devs

I still love the leap on my ranger’s auto attack…

But regardless the chain for the shield does feel very clunky, largely because of how slow it is and where the animations end. The impact doesn’t feel solid like so many other skills in GW2.