Guild Wars 2

Overload Earth’s protection duration for reduced drammatically from 20+ seconds to 8 ish seconds (Protection is gone when overload is at 12 seconds cooldown).

Please don’t be surprised if you cannot maintain a proper amount of protection without Elemental Shielding or Arcane.

Holy crap, they didn’t even state that in the official change notes. They probably knew this was going to cause a kittenstorm in the ele community, since ele got soooo many indirect buffs this patch. Too many. Well, I always had a soft spot for Anet, but this, this has made me despise them. I hope that ele is so useless this patch, nobody plays it like warrior pre-patch, so Anet buffs it next patch. In 3 months. Hey, at least Dark souls 3 is out in 3 months.
Edit: Sorry people, I copied the changes to a notepad and accidentally deleted quite some lines of text including Tempest and Thief stuff. Take my advice, don’t use notepad

After Overload Earth’s protection duration nerf and terrible change of DS, elementalist die for me.

Tomiyou.3790:

Holy crap, they didn’t even state that in the official change notes. They probably knew this was going to cause a kittenstorm in the ele community, since ele got soooo many indirect buffs this patch. Too many. Well, I always had a soft spot for Anet, but this, this has made me despise them. I hope that ele is so useless this patch, nobody plays it like warrior pre-patch, so Anet buffs it next patch. In 3 months. Hey, at least Dark souls 3 is out in 3 months.

Oh but they did post it. It’s the first thing under Tempest.

“Overload Earth: Fixed a bug that caused this overload to deliver extra protection per pulse rather than the intended 1 second per pulse. Fixed a bug that caused the lingering damage to follow the elementalist around after the overload had completed.”

… Maybe it is time to buff Hardy Conduit to at least cover the full channel with protection? But honestly, everyone hates Tempest now and everything goes into deaf ears when claiming that those are over-nerfs.

Arenanet balancing philosophy:

“kick ‘em when they’re down to make sure they stay down.”

On its own, one ability giving so much prot seemed to be OP, but given the power creep and insane risk of overloading, it actually seemed relatively balanced (esp. b/c it required you to stand in the field to get all the prot.)

Now, overload earth can join overload water in the “never to be used” pile. This once again highlights the terrible balance they really hit with overloading. Honestly, look at how insanely long the list of things overload earth does, and yet it still isn’t worth using unless it gives more than perma-prot all on its own.

Tempest really is just a terrible spec, carried at this point by spamming heals on aura (which is harder to do in pvp w/o healing power).

You would be better to go back to elemental attunement with Arcana. At this point Tempest only has air overload going for it. Great design…

Fire aura nerfed to 4sec and protection on earth overload are the two main things i hate from this patch. Totaly unneccessary. Even if the prot was a bug it was a good thing and actually made earth overload worth ….

Wolfric.9380:

Fire aura nerfed to 4sec and protection on earth overload are the two main things i hate from this patch. Totaly unneccessary. Even if the prot was a bug it was a good thing and actually made earth overload worth ….

Yea, that is what Anet doesn’t understand. Overload costs are so stupidly high, they need ridiculously OP effects to be worth using.

Its funny though. In the same patch they finally figured out that churning earth was unusable b/c of cast time (still mostly unusable with 2s cast), they “nerfed” overload earth…which suffers the same problem of stupidly long channel.

The lack of critical thinking skills over there is just astounding.

The protection ‘bug fix’ is a really big hit to my (PvE) Dagger/WH viper Ele build. I sacrificed some DPS going viper over sinister + balth, but gained near 100% protect uptime on me and about 66% up time on my group. It had become my favorite PvE build between all my characters post HoT… I need to look into how much more DPS I need to sacrifice to maintain protection uptime now.