Guild Wars 2

Elementalist
Ride the Lightning: This skill should now track moving enemies more reliably.
Magnetic Grasp: This skill should now track moving enemies more reliably and end correctly when you reach your target.
Evasive Arcana: This trait no longer creates unintended blast finishers.
Ether Renewal: This skill’s cast time has been reduced from 4.75 to 3.5 seconds. There is no change to the total amount of healing.
Healing Rain: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.
Armor of Earth: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.
Churning Earth: This skill’s description no longer references “hold and release.”
Signets of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: These skills should now have a cast animation while wielding a Fiery Greatsword.
Ring of Fire: This skill on Conjure Flame now lists itself as a Fire combo field.
Dragon’s Tooth: The blast finisher for this skill now triggers at the spell location rather than the character’s location.
Magnetic Wave: This skill’s missile-reflect portion now has an accompanying icon.
Phoenix: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 5 seconds of vigor that this skill applies.
Blasting Staff and Geomancer’s Alacrity: These traits now work together for the Eruption skill.
Mist Form: This skill now works with the Water Magic trait Cantrip Mastery.
Soothing Wave: This skill now properly applies regeneration to the elementalist when using Conjure Frost rather than only when the bow is picked up.
Healing Ripple: This skill’s scaling with healing power has been reduced by 50% in PvP only, as it had scaling that’s normally reserved for main healing skills. The maximum number of targets has also been reduced from infinite to 5.
Obsidian Focus: This Earth Magic trait now grants toughness when channeling the Stone Shards skill.
Ice Spike: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct amount of vulnerability when traited.
Conjure Frost Bow’s Deep Freeze: This skill now applies 1 second of chill per pulse, preventing extreme stacking of chill on a target.
Conjure Frost Bow’s Ice Storm: This skill now applies 5 seconds of bleeding per hit instead of confusion.
Tidal Wave: This skill’s responsiveness has been improved.
Tornado: Leaving this elite skill now removes the stability it grants in order to make it consistent with other elite transformation abilities.
Vapor Form: Fixed a bug that allowed this skill to contest a capture point.
Flame Axe: This weapon now grants the wielder power and condition damage.
Frost Bow: This weapon now grants the wielder increased condition duration and increased healing power.
Fiery Greatsword: This weapon now grants the wielder power and condition damage.
Magnetic Shield: This weapon now grants the wielder vitality and toughness.
Lightning Hammer: This weapon now grants the wielder increased precision and critical damage.

Enjoy the nerfs and see you ingame!

Yup, that was disappointing

Whats even more funny is that tornado has been nerfed even more! i actually laughed when ive seen that.

There was an awful lot of tooltip updates, not looking good for the future if this is what they consider a balancing patch.

yes, and the bug fixes that mattered the most, you have “should” instead of “is”

It could have been much worse. They fixed bugs and incongruencies where skills weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Whine more please.

Healing Rain: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.
Armor of Earth: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.

I was kind of fearing exactly this. Epic sigh.

Mist Form: This skill now works with the Water Magic trait Cantrip Mastery.

Just tested this. Cooldown after activation is still 75 seconds with the trait.

Evasive Arcana: This trait no longer creates unintended blast finishers.

Tested; NO BLAST FINISHER WHATSOEVER. Ultra nerf, dungeon groups will love this extreme reduction in group support.

They nerfed bunker ele but still give no other viable option. Ele other than bunker will still get insta killed by thief with Backstab and HS.

Im very very very disapointed

Mephane.8496:

Healing Rain: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.
Armor of Earth: This skill’s tooltip now states the correct duration of 6 seconds.

I was kind of fearing exactly this. Epic sigh.

Mist Form: This skill now works with the Water Magic trait Cantrip Mastery.

Just tested this. Cooldown after activation is still 75 seconds with the trait.

Uh I just tested it, It said 60 seconds on the Cooldown after I used it.

Conjured weapons got buffed though. I’m very pleased by this.

Healing ripple halved, evasive arcane nerfed to oblivion, gutted the 2monk2water2earth rune combo, yeap, staff ele got hit hard.

Ergh, why nerf our Tornado elite, not like I was using it anyway, but still. As previously mentioned our bunker builds have been nerfed but we’ve been given no other viable option. Incredibly disappointing

Lol well can’t please everyone.

The way I see it, the game is a continual work-in-progress and changes that are meant to come will come. Just be glad you’re not a Mesmer (like me) and nearly all your good skills got nerfed (need LoS, the ‘attack’ must connect and the target must be harmable or else your illusion will fail)…except Moa Morph which now can turn people into Tuna underwater…

My opinion:
crosses fingers with Magnetic Grasp/RtL It feels like those skills have gotten worse since I started playing, that is more and more buggier…

Evasive Arcana…lol, it felt a bit pointless on Dagger/Dagger anyway and just made Staff broken. Needed to be done, IMO.

YaY for Ether Renewal! It is probably the best heal now while Signet of Restoration is still #*!@.

Yay for my cantrips. Now I can use Mist Form more.

Yay for my Scepter/Focus! Now I can buff team might with Fire Wall + Dragon’s Tooth + Phoenix! And I can finally tell when Magnetic Wave stops reflecting stuff!

They’re trying to make the conjures more attractive…let’s see if it works…

Everything else is probably meh…the worst that could come of this is 30 in Arcane isn’t such a no-brainer…although I didn’t keep 30 in Arcane for very long.

So here’s the real quick bottomline: Bunker, staff support Ele got completely murdered by the patch, while Guardian bunkers skated by relatively unscathed. Eles otherwise received no buffs — minus, subject to testing, some likely meaningless conjured weapon changes — but a significant number of pseudo-nerfs (particularly tooltip changes that confirmed the kittened form of certain abilities).

Lifelike.5862:

Conjured weapons got buffed though. I’m very pleased by this.

can you see how much the buff is?
i wont be in game for 7 hours or so.

It’s ok! At least with the nerf of bunker builds we got a buff of… oh wait… never mind, we did not.

Oh and I literally laughed out loud at the Tornado change.

they coulda thrown us a bone and actually made healing rain the higher duration instead of just ‘fixing’ it to match the tooltip.

What happened to the damage buffs?

theres me thinking that guild wars 2 might actually promote people playing different classes.. seems to me they just want everyone to play warrior and everyone to just use power build and hit eachother until 1 dies. some of the nerfs just made me lol.. i mean come on arcana and water are the only decent skill trees.. thanks for kittening me like a kitten

conjure weapon IS crap since it remove access to you others regular skills. You cant buff crap and expect to get something else than buffed crap.

Might stacking in general was nerfed. Scepter/dagger lost Might because of how the Dragon’s Tooth blast finisher works, except in fights that start in melee range anyway, as well as losing the Evasive Arcana/dodge roll option.

Hmm… i just tested mist form and while the tooltip says 60 secs i turned on the CD timer and it still shows 75 seconds with cantrip mastery applied…

Funny thing is, if they really intended to nerf bunker ele in PvP… they completely screwed PvE suppport ele both in dungeons and dynamic events.

Bleh. Weakest armor in game. Weakest hp ingame. And now you buff our only counter? (bunker build)? Evasive arcane should grand 1 blast finisher every 10 secs. End of story. More then one each 10 secs in same element probably OP. This however is underpowered. It surprises me Arenanet over and over ‘does small tweaks’ but in reality do huge changes. Realize this Jon peters. Evasive arcana effects (apart from water one) ARE WEAKER then the blast bonus. Get it? Weaker. So you just made Evasive arcane a grandmaster trait for the squishest class in the game, and one of the only worthwhile ones, over 50% weaker?

I’m laughing hard at it.

Same as Gw1. Overpowered ritualist (now guardian/warrior). They brought some laughable boost to the elementalist in gw1 but they never fixed the ‘ele need mana so they loose at least 2 skills only for mana management, compared to other profession’.

Same here. Now our problem is ‘squishyness’. We barely can survive. And now you made it worse.

I’m no longer getting any might stack from dragon’s tooth. tested it within my combo field a few times…

Bunker Ele needed nerfs and Ride the Lightning/Magnetic Grasp needed fixes. Both things happened. Good patch for Elementalists, imo.

I am just disgusted by all this.

Why is it we have no fall reduction, lowest hit points and poor armour?

What is the point of our AOE when WvW turtles make it useless?

What do we bring to the table that a warrior with banners does not and yet they get armour and hit points as high as can be?

….and to nerf tornado. Please, you have to be making some sort of joke with that?

Facepunch.5710:

It could have been much worse. They fixed bugs and incongruencies where skills weren’t doing what they were supposed to. Whine more please.

Mist form is still broken. It’s not affected by the Cantrip Mastery trait (I just tested, still on a 75 second cooldown)

mouse.1689:

Bunker Ele needed nerfs and Ride the Lightning/Magnetic Grasp needed fixes. Both things happened. Good patch for Elementalists, imo.

Ele also desperately needed buffs in a few trait lines (fire and air).

This patch is a frakking joke. I would have been OK with completely destroying bunkers if we got a viable damage option, which we don’t. Fact is evasive arcane was our only viable spec.

That’s gone now. As am I. Arenanet doesn’t know frak about balancing. Can’t say it was fun until now because it actually wasn’t.

Checking in game:

Frost Bow = 1min +180 Healing and 20% condition duration
Lightning Hammer = 1min +5% critical damage and +180 percision
Earth Shield = 180 to Vitality and Toughness
Flame Axe = 180 power and condition damage
Flaming Greatsword = 260 power and 180 condition damage

When I see patch notes like these I can’t help but wonder if the people making these changes actually spend time playing the class. I will be the first to agree that our bunker builds were very effective, and needed to be scaled back a bit. They did just that, but they didn’t give us anything in return.

I don’t think there is anyone that would complain if we got a bit of a DPS increase, or some more survivability when glass specced. Right now to be really effective in high level play we almost need to be a support or bunker spec. A DPS spec is just not really doable with any reliability.

I think the buff to out conjured weapons is a good thing, but how they function needs to be changed before they are worth any of our utility slots. As for the nerf to Tornado, I was not sure if I should laugh or cry.

thetreebranch.4831:

mouse.1689:

Bunker Ele needed nerfs and Ride the Lightning/Magnetic Grasp needed fixes. Both things happened. Good patch for Elementalists, imo.

Ele also desperately needed buffs in a few trait lines (fire and air).

All classes need improvements to their trait lines. They’ll happen eventually. In this patch they fixed some of the worst Ele bugs and nerfed only what was actually a problem. The changes aren’t particularly interesting, but they were right on target, imo.

mouse.1689:

thetreebranch.4831:

mouse.1689:

Bunker Ele needed nerfs and Ride the Lightning/Magnetic Grasp needed fixes. Both things happened. Good patch for Elementalists, imo.

Ele also desperately needed buffs in a few trait lines (fire and air).

All classes need improvements to their trait lines. They’ll happen eventually. In this patch they fixed some of the worst Ele bugs and nerfed only what was actually a problem. The changes aren’t particularly interesting, but they were right on target, imo.

You cannot completely gut the only viable build a class has in a patch and not give them a single buff to compensate.

Ele is dead. PVP is dead. This game is dead.

Aether McLoud.1975:

That’s gone now. As am I. Arenanet doesn’t know frak about balancing. Can’t say it was fun until now because it actually wasn’t.

The question now is: since Anet have no clue about balancing a game, should we keep playing it?

MasterDeere.3417:

Aether McLoud.1975:

That’s gone now. As am I. Arenanet doesn’t know frak about balancing. Can’t say it was fun until now because it actually wasn’t.

The question now is: since Anet have no clue about balancing a game, should we keep playing it?

I for one won’t.

mouse.1689:

thetreebranch.4831:

mouse.1689:

Bunker Ele needed nerfs and Ride the Lightning/Magnetic Grasp needed fixes. Both things happened. Good patch for Elementalists, imo.

Ele also desperately needed buffs in a few trait lines (fire and air).

All classes need improvements to their trait lines. They’ll happen eventually. In this patch they fixed some of the worst Ele bugs and nerfed only what was actually a problem. The changes aren’t particularly interesting, but they were right on target, imo.

They did not. Mistform not working with Cantrip mastery was one of the worst elementalist bugs and its STILL not working.

Could not be more disappointed with the patch.
Evasive arcana nerf was an extremely poor choice. If they really wanted to nerf it, changing the dodge spell to a blast finisher and limiting to to once every 10 seconds would have been perfect. With this change one of our few viable options for boosting damage, and healing in dungeons has gone.

Where are our buffs
- Traits redesigned so they aren’t totally useless
- Buffs to underwater combat so we can actually kill things, not just CC for 5mins on 1 mob
- Minor buffs to damage and better bursts so a power build becomes viable.

All I see is buffs to conjures..which very few people use anyway..and tooltip fixes.

Well I guess the trade off was all worth it for 2 decent bug fixes right? right?….

Aether McLoud.1975:

You cannot completely gut the only viable build a class has in a patch and not give them a single buff to compensate.

Complete hyperbole:

• Bunker is weakened but still viable.

• Bunker is not even remotely the only viable build. Scepter/Dagger AoE damage builds are viable. Team Paradigm’s Ele uses one. Dagger/Dagger Aura sharing builds are viable. Many competitive teams run one or even two of them.

People have been claiming that Staff Bunker is the only viable build for weeks and it’s just not true. It was certainly the most overpowered build, but it was relying on a bug (Evasive Arcana was never intended to give blast finishers) and now it’s fixed.

lol mouse get real.

Evasive Arcana was such a fun trait to play around with…4 blast finishers by switching attunements was a little overpowered but maybe make it so that 1 blast finisher can be created every 10 seconds (shared across all attunements)? That was such a fun playstyle…such a shame to see it go down the drain.

Leo G.4501:

Checking in game:

Frost Bow = 1min +180 Healing and 20% condition duration
Lightning Hammer = 1min +5% critical damage and +180 percision
Earth Shield = 180 to Vitality and Toughness
Flame Axe = 180 power and condition damage
Flaming Greatsword = 260 power and 180 condition damage

thanks Leo.
Thats a fairly substantial boost but still low enough a lot of people wont care… except when given to other folks.

Looks like ether renewal got a nice buff. I’ll be checking that out for sure :p

Aether McLoud.1975:

You cannot completely gut the only viable build a class has in a patch and not give them a single buff to compensate.

Sure you can. It’s not like, later when they throw some add into the game, all the min/maxers won’t flock to the new FotM like the sheep they are.

Ele is dead. PVP is dead. This game is dead.

lol doom?

Leo G.4501:

Checking in game:

Frost Bow = 1min +180 Healing and 20% condition duration
Lightning Hammer = 1min +5% critical damage and +180 percision
Earth Shield = 180 to Vitality and Toughness
Flame Axe = 180 power and condition damage
Flaming Greatsword = 260 power and 180 condition damage

That’s a pretty significant buff… Warrants some checking into.

Leo G.4501:

Lol well can’t please everyone.

The way I see it, the game is a continual work-in-progress and changes that are meant to come will come. Just be glad you’re not a Mesmer (like me) and nearly all your good skills got nerfed (need LoS, the ‘attack’ must connect and the target must be harmable or else your illusion will fail)…except Moa Morph which now can turn people into Tuna underwater…

My opinion:
crosses fingers with Magnetic Grasp/RtL It feels like those skills have gotten worse since I started playing, that is more and more buggier…

Evasive Arcana…lol, it felt a bit pointless on Dagger/Dagger anyway and just made Staff broken. Needed to be done, IMO.

YaY for Ether Renewal! It is probably the best heal now while Signet of Restoration is still #*!@.

Yay for my cantrips. Now I can use Mist Form more.

Yay for my Scepter/Focus! Now I can buff team might with Fire Wall + Dragon’s Tooth + Phoenix! And I can finally tell when Magnetic Wave stops reflecting stuff!

They’re trying to make the conjures more attractive…let’s see if it works…

Everything else is probably meh…the worst that could come of this is 30 in Arcane isn’t such a no-brainer…although I didn’t keep 30 in Arcane for very long.

Awww, poor mesmers.
- 100% dmg increase on presitge
- Moa usable under water and pulls necors out of DS
- Phantasm cd reduction trait works
Let’s sit in a circle and cry about how horrible it is that mesmers can’t cast phantasms through walls any more and have longer cd on portal.

And YAY for you not only not checking, but also not reading. Enough people confimred that MF cd still isn;t fixed.

Btw, bout ER…doesn;t less duration = less pulses = less condition removal? I can’t really place myself in a situation where I can reliably check it….and I use SoR as main heal anyway, but was just wondering…

Overall, the patch notes don’t affect me, but it still looks pretty bad for those who used most of it….

1 blast finisher was fine imo, it was the bug that allowed you to make two or more during the 10 sec CD that was the problem. Now there is NO finishers at all.

So effectively Staff builds got the axe making it a worthless weapon with it’s lovely halved healing, lowest single target/easily avoided by strafing dps in game, no combos now, and 5 cap AoE that is negated totally by stacking. GG.

Someone at ANet office must REALLY have it in for eles I suppose. Warrior or bust? Pet classes or not at all? FUN!

mouse.1689:

Aether McLoud.1975:

You cannot completely gut the only viable build a class has in a patch and not give them a single buff to compensate.

Complete hyperbole:

• Bunker is weakened but still viable.

• Bunker is not even remotely the only viable build. Scepter/Dagger AoE damage builds are viable. Team Paradigm’s Ele uses one. Dagger/Dagger Aura sharing builds are viable. Many competitive teams run one or even two of them.

People have been claiming that Staff Bunker is the only viable build for weeks and it’s just not true. It was certainly the most overpowered build, but it was relying on a bug (Evasive Arcana was never intended to give blast finishers) and now it’s fixed.

Aoe dammage build rely on allies when downed(cause they get downed fast and easy). Downed hp reduce by 75% in this patch therefore nerfed.

Aura sharing builds are also bunker based build therefore nerfed by rippling wave nerf and EA nerf.

What pissed me the most is were still stuck with same old builds after this patch but nerfed version.

Well, I’ll certainly have to redo my build a bit, but overall I’m happy with these notes.

But are RTL/Magnetic Grasp really fixed? It will improve the flow of the class so much if they are.

just bring as the blasts on a 10 sec timer..pls anet it was such a fun playstyle//Nerf wwater healing combos or nerf our healing scaling in general, but dont take out fun.
Not to mention that you butchered ele bunker/support while you let guardians specc still quite viable

D/D eles not that effected so its a nerf but not as massive as the one to staff which really…really did not need such a kick in the kittens.

The kicker here is that guardians bunkers came away more or less unscathed. So it’s ok for them to bunker but no one else? Really?