Guild Wars 2

It’s about time. I know everyone was sick of those darn FOTM elementalists with their OP tornado elite just owning the place! =P

[quote=746310;TWMagimay.9057:

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.[/quote]

Lawl Prestige…Might actually care if Torch wasn’t generally garbage since it summons no illusions.

But yeah, the only real buff to them was to Moa. Phantasm redux did work, just not across the board and uniformly. Now it might actually be worth using on a Phantasm build.

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

It’s the thought that counts, IMO. Mist Form is suppose to cool down faster with the trait rather than it being changed from a Cantrip to a Transformation which has no trait to decrease cooldown. It will get fixed and this is one step closer.

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…

It will remove conditions quicker, AFAIK. It has the same amount of pulses, just faster. If anything, because it casts faster, that means it will start recharging faster and therefore = more available healing.

noticed something…frost armor lasts a long time now…or is that just in my head?

fixit.7189:

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.

Yeah, that was also what I assumed when I read the patch notes, i.e. that only each spell with its 10 sec internal cooldown could perform the blast finisher, not dodge rolls on evasive arcana effects that are on cooldown. Instead, they entirely removed blast finishers.

What is so super-annoying is that this nerf was obviously aimed at sPvP, but hit PvE just as hard, if not worse. Evasive Arcana + Water fields was the source of burst AoE healing in tight situations, and the one mechanic that made ele support special and interesting. Now it is just about laying down healing fields and hoping someone else happens to perform a finisher during that brief window (also note, instead of fixing Healing Rain’s too short duration, they just changed the tooltip).

Extremely disappointed with this patch. Stacking might with Scepter/Dagger or Staff was a major way of contributing in dungeons, and helped when soloing (I’m talking PvE here, not concerned re: PvP/WvW). I felt we needed some more tweaking buff-wise to be at a good spot, yet they just nerfed our best trait and gave us… Conjured Weapon buffs?? They’re still not viable in their current implementation, and I really am hoping a future class patch is very close-by or I guess I’ll have to jump on the Warrior bandwagon.

Edit: And to add, the support staff aspect of dodging into water fields was also nerfed…
I understand where Anet is coming from, wanting us to ‘combo’ our fields with others’ blast finishers, fine. But if you take something critical away, you must fill that gap with something else, and Conjured Weapons was unfortunately not the way to go due to issues with being unable to change attunements etc etc.

Well I’ll jump the “get the frak out of this game” bandwagon. With the way anet handled ele since the last beta weekends and after release we will NEVER see a proper class balance patch. NEVER.

MasterDeere.3417:

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.

Downed state health was reduced by 25%, not 75%. The exact wording was: “PvP downed health is now 75% of what it was.”

This is actually a buff to AoE builds, because one of the builds’ strengths is the ability to finish enemies by AoEing them (and the people trying to rally them) by just dropping massive AoE on them instead of trying to manually stomp.

MasterDeere.3417:

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

Healing Ripple is a nerf, but not a terrible one. The Evasive Arcana nerf barely affects D/D Eles. The reason it was busted for Staff Eles was because it combo’d so well with the water field on Healing Rain. D/D Ele’s rarely if ever drop a Ring of Fire, switch to water, and start spamming dodge rolls for the combo finisher.

I play D/D and I use evasive arcane all the time to stack might. Since we lack truly viable damage builds this was one of the only ways to boost damage significantly. That is now gone…..Please tell me how i can achieve the same effectiveness without those might stacks and I will stop moaning.

mouse.1689:

In this patch they fixed some of the worst Ele bugs and nerfed only what was actually a problem.

Haha, yeah! Tornado was OP as heck! I’d pretty much toggle it and the whole rest of the zone would surrender and start mailing me money to make me turn it off early.

Leo G.4501:

Lawl Prestige…Might actually care if Torch wasn’t generally garbage since it summons no illusions.

But yeah, the only real buff to them was to Moa. Phantasm redux did work, just not across the board and uniformly. Now it might actually be worth using on a Phantasm build.

Wait, what? Torch is off-hand… It has it’s Phantasm)confusion/retaliation) just like every other offhand weapon and no clones, just like every other off-hand weapon. What it does have is a blast finisher and is a nice support weapon. Mesmers from my guild reported 2k+ with Prestige without counting the conditions…

Well, that is a fix, and a good one at that.

Also, the guy QQed about the mesmer changes…I see nothing to QQ about(and, yes, I have mesmer also). The only thing you can call a nerf if the LOS on phantasms(no more phantasms on wvw walls, I guess). And when you think about how they fixed the EA)since that poster was claiming mesmer to be worse off)….yeah, that’d have been like completely obliterating phantasms until the next patch xD

It’s the thought that counts, IMO. Mist Form is suppose to cool down faster with the trait rather than it being changed from a Cantrip to a Transformation which has no trait to decrease cooldown. It will get fixed and this is one step closer.

That wasn’t my point though. The guy YAY’d for the fix without even knowing it hasn;t occurred. As for the thought counting….They have those test servers, don’t they? Didn;t anybody bother checking?! You choose to think they meant well. I choose to think they didn;t care and hoped nobody will notice(because a number in the tooltip is much easier to change than an actual skill).

It will remove conditions quicker, AFAIK. It has the same amount of pulses, just faster. If anything, because it casts faster, that means it will start recharging faster and therefore = more available healing.

Well, that does sound nice, I guess. Like I said, I don’t use it(felt too locked in the animation and conditions don’t always come at the speed required)…+ I have Written in Stone which makes SoR sparkle…. It was just curiosity, guess we’ll see the reactions when people actually put it to the test…

Melchior.2135:

mouse.1689:

In this patch they fixed some of the worst Ele bugs and nerfed only what was actually a problem.

Haha, yeah! Tornado was OP as heck! I’d pretty much toggle it and the whole rest of the zone would surrender and start mailing me money to make me turn it off early.

Granted, I ignored that change since it’s a nerf to something no one used in the first place.

I wonder if half of you guys even play the game.

There was more than one viable Ele build if you put some thought into things as opposed to just copying whatever you’ve been told is good by people who are barely qualified to be any kind of authority on the matter.

While I don’t agree with quite a few of the changes, and at least 50% of them are completely useless as far as changing functionality (hint: those conjure changes will not see them more widely used in any way), it’s not the end of the kittening world.

Note that commentary from here out leans more heavily towards the pvp related effects.

Ether Renewal actually got slightly nerfed, since the reduced channel time now means less ticks of condition removal, and the condition removal was why it was the best pvp heal. In many ways the reduction in channel time is better from a straight healing point of view (it’s certainly the best heal per second we have now), but it looks like we lost around 3 (maybe 4?) ticks of condition removal, which isn’t so great. This assumes the number of condition clearing ticks was reduced proportionate to the amount of time chopped off the channel. If that’s not the case and we’re getting the same amount of ticks as before then it’s a collossal buff.

Evasive Arcana was broken in every regard. If the original tooltip is representative of the intended function, the only blast finisher it should ever have had was on an earth dodge. Stop crying because they fixed your ability to dodge for free finishers at every opportunity. Now, with that said, they should have fixed the rest of it while they were at it, because it of course has zero value now (though I’ve long been of the opinion that for aggressive/somewhat glassy builds, it was a waste of trait points anyway, because dodging for 3 stacks of might is wasting your endurance when you need it to mitigate damage, and slowing down your burst, giving them valuable time to react). In any case, unless you were playing a bunker build, you can live without it, just like I have been for the past 6-8 weeks. Despite what some people would have you think, it’s not necessary. Stop being sheep.

RtL/Magnetic Grasp sounds promising, but I’m pretty sure they claimed to have improved magnetic grasp last patch, and while it was better, it was still screwing up. I’ll hold judgement on it until I see how reliable it now is. If it is close to completely reliable now, that’s going to make a big difference.

All the tooltip fixes are a bit ‘meh’. Doesn’t seem like something that couldn’t have been done weeks ago, instead of leaving it until now and padding the patch notes with it, but whatever.

Dragons Tooth change is a bit sucky and seems counter intuitive (so I cast it on a group of allies who are in a field so they can get the buff while I’m standing outside cheering them on?).

Conjure changes are a waste of time – The problem is the core mechanic of the skill, and it won’t be solved by tweaking cooldowns and adding passive buffs when you have them equipped. At the end of the day they’re not competitive enough options compared to our Cantrips, and, in some cases, signets/various arcane skills.

Tornado was terrible before, and now it’s even more terrible. Not much more to be said, or even much to be disappointed about since nobody with any sense used it before anyway.

A bunch of other random ‘meh’ stuff that i have no real opinion on.

In short:

D/D is about the same as it was before.
S/D is a little bit nerfed due to Dragons Tooth, but fared pretty well overall.
Non-bunker Staff builds don’t seem to have been hugely affected.
Bunker Staff builds got gutted, as well they should have, because bunkers are kittening stupid, and if you can’t survive burst, that’s your problem, not the games. The only time a Thief ever bursted me down before I had time to react was if he landed a perfect backstab combo on me, and by perfect, I mean splitsecond perfect. use your utilities for survival and stop wasting them on dumb skills.

My own builds are completely unaffected (sadly – I’d have liked to drop a few points here and there so I could pack more ‘oomph’, but my damage feels reasonably solid compared to my survivability), and that’s D/D for pvp (spvp/wvw – running the same build in both), and S/D for pve (occasionally dipping into Staff for fights like lupicus where the range helps).

Don’t forget that thieves have taken a huge hit to their damage, so while we didn’t receive many direct buffs, we’re not doing too badly as a result of the indirect changes.

The sky isn’t falling.

Then explain why Bunker guardians, mesmers and warriors were left alone, but ele bunkers got nerfed to the ground?

The more I think about the destruction of Evasive Arcana (it’s not just a nerf, the main purpose of the trait got removed), the more I feel sad. Not just for the severely nerfed suppport capabilities – I estimate my group healing in dungeons to go down by ~50%, and burst healing is removed almost entirely now – but the entire playstyle.

Because, let’s face it. Laying down Healing Rain and then rolling is was fun. Extremely fun. Even more so as a little asura. It was one of the things that for me made the profession feel just right in terms of playstyle. Now I will be reduced to standing at max range and throwing in a water field as soon as people are hurt a bit. Unable to save someone from impending doom, and at max range unlikely to help up a downed melee. Oh am I looking forward to the new dungeon with my nerfed healing and dumbed down playstyle.

What I don’t get is why they nerfed Evasive Arcana also in PvE, while at the same time making quite a lot of PvP-only nerfs to some classes. Evasive Arcana in PvE was not only just fine, it was something that groups liked us for, something really useful we brought into dungeons.

MasterDeere.3417:

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.

Sounds like you just don’t know how to use conjured weapons. The idea is to summon, use a few skills, then drop them strategically to re-gain access to your regular skills. Your skills are still available to you at all times, you just have to learn to drop your kit.

@ Arc its not even the fact skills got nerfed. Everyone agrees that EA was overpowered its that we got nothing in return. No buffs at all (except to useless conjures)

This is a BIG problem and shows Anet has no idea about ele mechanics or just doesn’t care.

Lifelike.5862:

MasterDeere.3417:

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.

Sounds like you just don’t know how to use conjured weapons. The idea is to summon, use a few skills, then drop them strategically to re-gain access to your regular skills. Your skills are still available to you at all times, you just have to learn to drop your kit.

Sounds like you don’t pvp. Conjures are utterly, completely, frakking, useless in pvp. No matter how many buffs they give.

So in one patch, staff got utterly gutted. Great…

Now it’s D/D and S/D are the only real viable weapon sets.

Staff brings nothing to the table anymore and became a joke in one fell swoop.

I been playin staff since BWE1 as my weapon of choice…now it’s D/D only….

Boo, hiss!

Arc.9374:

Aether McLoud.1975:

Then explain why Bunker guardians, mesmers and warriors were left alone, but ele bunkers got nerfed to the ground?

If you think Ele’s were nerfed into the ground you need to quit the game and go do something else with your life, because you either can’t see through your own blind bias and understand the actual effects of the changes, or because you’re completely terrible.

Stop being so melodramatic.

(Also – Guardian block bug has been fixed, mesmers don’t bunker very well and had a lot of mobility and targetting changes, and if you think warriors are somehow overpowered I have no kittening clue what to say).

It would do you good to stop using ad hominems which makes your whole argument useless.

Also bunker guardians got BUFFED even.

So stop talking about stuff you know nothing about.

Unfortunately, Lava axe is still useless (still low hits even with the buff), and earth shield is still mostly useless. Also, the stat buff only applies to you when you cast your spell and ends when you drop your conjured weapon. Picking up the other conjure doesn’t re apply the buff.

At least ice bow 4 is hitting harder now.

Aether McLoud.1975:

Lifelike.5862:

MasterDeere.3417:

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.

Sounds like you just don’t know how to use conjured weapons. The idea is to summon, use a few skills, then drop them strategically to re-gain access to your regular skills. Your skills are still available to you at all times, you just have to learn to drop your kit.

Sounds like you don’t pvp. Conjures are utterly, completely, frakking, useless in pvp. No matter how many buffs they give.

Just like non-bunker builds are utter, completely, frakking useless in PvP, right?

Very disappointed to hear that the conjure buff only affects the first weapon sommoned though…

zombyturtle.5980:

@ Arc its not even the fact skills got nerfed. Everyone agrees that EA was overpowered its that we got nothing in return. No buffs at all (except to useless conjures)

This is a BIG problem and shows Anet has no idea about ele mechanics or just doesn’t care.

I don’t disagree at all with that sentiment.

We didn’t really get anything apart from a couple of quality of life changes, some tooltip fixes, a few nerfs (of varying degrees of severity), and a bunch of other tacked on pointless stuff that won’t really change much either way.

But then, most classes are in a similar position with this patch. I didn’t look much at the Engy/Ranger sections of the notes, but there are few buffs to be seen across the board.

On the whole it’s a lot of fixing and updating tooltips, with some nerfs thrown around, and the odd minor buff here and there.

It’s not like they buffed every class in the game and nerfed us. Every class got tweaked downward a little, and we didn’t even come close to being hit the hardest (seriously – go look at the thief changes. There’s gonna be a huge bunch of easymoders re-rolling tomorrow).

A lot of people here are overreacting and hunting for pitchforks instead of actually thinking things through.

Also bunker guardians got BUFFED even.

They did?

Block bug fixed – Nerf.
Svanir Runes fixed – Nerf.
SoJ duration reduced 2s – Nerf.
Selfless daring healing co-efficient reduced by 50% – Nerf.

They got 2 buffs. Of which one might be actually beneficial to a bunker role.

Drop the hyperbole.

Lifelike.5862:

Aether McLoud.1975:

Lifelike.5862:

MasterDeere.3417:

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.

Sounds like you just don’t know how to use conjured weapons. The idea is to summon, use a few skills, then drop them strategically to re-gain access to your regular skills. Your skills are still available to you at all times, you just have to learn to drop your kit.

Sounds like you don’t pvp. Conjures are utterly, completely, frakking, useless in pvp. No matter how many buffs they give.

Just like non-bunker builds are utter, completely, frakking useless in PvP, right?

For ele yes.
For all other classes no.

Arc, you are stated u don’t use staff much and pretty much into D/D and S/D which both only got minor nerfs so of course you are fine with these changes. We get it, you did not like staff bunkers and don’t mind them getting massive nerfs since it does not effect you one bit other being able to smoke staff users way easier now.

TheWarKeeper.5374:

Elementalist
Evasive Arcana: This trait no longer creates unintended blast finishers.
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.
Mist Form: This skill now works with the Water Magic trait Cantrip Mastery.
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.
Conjure Frost Bow’s Ice Storm: This skill now applies 5 seconds of bleeding per hit instead of confusion.
Tornado: Leaving this elite skill now removes the stability it grants in order to make it consistent with other elite transformation abilities.
Flame Axe: This weapon now grants the wielder 166 power and 166 condition damage.
Frost Bow: This weapon now grants the wielder 20% increased condition duration and 166 healing power.
Fiery Greatsword: This weapon now grants the wielder 239 power and 166 condition damage.
Magnetic Shield: This weapon now grants the wielder 166 vitality and 166 toughness.
Lightning Hammer: This weapon now grants the wielder 166 precision and 5% critical damage.

Enjoy the nerfs and see you ingame!

So taking this point by point going down the list….because these are the bullets I am most infuriated by

1) ARE YOU SERIOUS?! Our best trait (by a landslide mind you) just got nerfed into near uselessness. The sole reason this trait was ever useful was to be able to easily blast combo into fields for quick healing, quick AoE might, AoE Frost Armor, etc etc at the expensive of your best defensive ability in the game…your dodge roll. I would really appreciate some developer insight into this and why this was necessary, especially since the Elementalist traits are some of the most bland and weak traits of any class.

2) It’s as I feared, the tooltip was bugged and not the skill duration itself. I could live with this….what am I saying? I can’t live with this; not since Evasive Arcana no longer has blast finishers, and the most consistent blast finisher we have is Eruption….which is horrendously tedious to time due to a long cast-channel time. Couple that with the fact it fails to ‘erupt’ half the time because you get dazed/knockdown midcast and the channel on it cancels….our only reliable way to combo off our own fields is to throw rocks at the speed of molasses or to waste 2 utility slots on the terrible arcane finishers.

3) You know, I thought it was odd that even with and without points in the Arcana tree, the tooltip duration said 8.5 seconds no matter how many or few points were thrown in there. If only I had sat down and taken a serious look at it and said “Nah, there’s no way an 11 second stability + protection on a 90 second cooldown is balanced, they clearly meant base duration to be 6 seconds, not 8.5” my punching bag could’ve avoided another jab.

But seriously though…it takes almost 2.5 months to fix MINOR tooltip errors like this? Color me impressed, I’ll need to send extra thanks to my computer engineering friends and commend on them on the extra hard work they must do.

3) Well…at least it works now, not that I ever used that trait because there are better traits….in the 1st tier of majors mind you. See above paragraph for additional snark commentary.

4) That hurts a lot….probably not as much as the note makes it seem, but that scaling was 1.0 of your healing power, now it’s 0.5 if I had to take a guess. I’m a firm believer though in if damaging AoEs are capped, so should healing AoEs as it will help alleviate the infamous zerg stack turtle in WvW. Still upset by this one, but not infuriated to the level of the Evasive Arcana change.

5) Hoo-rah Marines, we now get a god awful condition in place of a really overpowered condition on guess what…a conjure weapon….which were (and still are) some of the worst utility skills in the pool.

@Arc Understand you post. I play a D/D ele and use might stacking to boost damage alongside a 10/0/0/30/30 build which I was advised to do in these forums.

Now that 2 of my might stacking abilities have been nerfed can you explain how I can achieve the same damage in PVE and sPVP using D/D without these stacks of might.

Can you also advise a strategy on how staff can be useful in dungeon without the ability to inform teammates quickly where i am laying down fields. The inability to blash roll in these means I can only apply 1 boon to teammates without their help, which is extremely crippling to the build.

If so I would be very grateful and would stop moaning.
(I am serious here. Need to redo my entire build )

6) Tornado goes from used on occasion to used never with this one. Sure, melee have a hard time killing you, good thing they have the ability to swap to a ranged weapon and get free pew-pew. Now, I’m sure this was a bug that cancelling the form allowed you to retain stability, but at a 180 second cooldown…….I’d rather just not have an Elite skill equipped at this point. Everything but the Earth elemental on the Elite glyph die way too fast, and the Earth elemental won’t taunt things in WvW off of me so…yea…can I just equip a 4th utility?

7-11) This totally makes the conjure weapons worth it…wait, no it doesn’t. You still lose out on your stats from your real equipped weapons and either Mist Form, Cleansing Flame, Armor of Earth, Lightning Flash, or…wait a second…not even Tornado has any good uses as an Elite skill now, so yea just those 4 and the massive stat nerfs you don’t get back anyway. I’ll give it an C for effort in regards to making the conjure weapons more appealing because this was a kitten attempt at best. And it definitely didn’t make them any more appealing to use.

I’m dumbfounded, speechless, and in general very upset with the handling of everything as of late regarding GW2. I don’t deny the spec I ran with was ridiculous, it was pretty absurd what I could do (see this thread for 1st hand accounts, about halfway down the 2nd page). But it was the only thing I could do, and I didn’t do it any better than a bunker specced Warrior/Guardian to boot.

I suppose I’m just confused as to how this is balancing in any sense of the word. Single-Double-Triple Chop auto-attack chain does more damage on its own as a bunker Warrior than any combination of crazy button mashing and APM on a bunker Ele could ever accomplish, so why nerf us is I guess what I’m getting at. If you can’t be killed, you shouldn’t have the luxury to kill either.

I was excited for the buff to conjures, since I like conjures, but taking another look at it, it’s still not really all that great at all.

Oh well.

Lifelike.5862:

Very disappointed to hear that the conjure buff only affects the first weapon sommoned though…

I dont much care about this as I am a loner… but i get that having the dropped weapon be buffed would make an ele very group friendly.

makes them the best weapons in the game doesnt it? save for maybe other other environmental weapons.

err… not best… biggest power buff. on par with legendary weapons i guess. hard for me to compare.

fixit.7189:

Arc, you are stated u don’t use staff much and pretty much into D/D and S/D which both only got minor nerfs so of course you are fine with these changes. We get it, you did not like staff bunkers and don’t mind them getting massive nerfs since it does not effect you one bit other being able to smoke staff users way easier now.

Staff bunkers needed to be toned down.

Anyone who disputes that fact has not done enough tPvP to know that a well played one is essentially immortal, excepting stupidly overwhelming odds (which aren’t feasible in a 5v5 setting).

I’m not saying that bunker guardians or bunker engies are less stupid, but bunkers in general are bad for the game, and were too survivable. I’m also not saying that you shouldn’t be able to be tanky if you want to be, but ‘tanky’ should give you the ability to hold off 2 guys for 15-25seconds or so until your backup arrives, not forever. It unbalances the distribution of manpower, and marginalizes the metagame into bunker or burst, since if you take the middle ground balanced build, you lose to both extremes. Both bunkers and burst needed to be toned back in order for the balanced builds to stand a competitive chance.

People are complaining about their bunkers being nerfed and forgetting that other classes got damage nerfs, which means you don’t need to be super immortal any more, and if it were capable to do so (which it may still be on certain classes – I’m not claiming a totally comprehensive knowledge of the game here, but I do know Ele) then the games new metagame would be immensely bunker centric, since the burst isn’t as powerful as it was before, leading to nothing coming even close to keeping them in check.

@zomby – I’ll create a new thread for my build. It’s not anything completely off the wall, and it’s more about how you play it, than being a ‘one build to rule them all’ type dealy.

It’s not that bunkers got nerfed Arc. ELE bunkers got GUTTED. Guardian and engineer bunkers got BUFFED.

Arc.9374:

fixit.7189:

Arc, you are stated u don’t use staff much and pretty much into D/D and S/D which both only got minor nerfs so of course you are fine with these changes. We get it, you did not like staff bunkers and don’t mind them getting massive nerfs since it does not effect you one bit other being able to smoke staff users way easier now.

Staff bunkers needed to be toned down.

Anyone who disputes that fact has not done enough tPvP to know that a well played one is essentially immortal, excepting stupidly overwhelming odds (which aren’t feasible in a 5v5 setting).

Well I will not dispute the claim because I have never played tPvP. I played a lot of dungeons and dynamic events and these so-called bunker nerf is an even more massive staff support nerf (overall healing reduced by 50%, burst healing impossible now).

and windborne daggers is still broken as well as mist form

Aether McLoud.1975:

It’s not that bunkers got nerfed Arc. ELE bunkers got GUTTED. Guardian and engineer bunkers got BUFFED.

I’d like you to direct me to the exact lines in the patch notes that buff guardians.

I haven’t looked at the Engy notes, so I’m not going to comment on that.

Great. RTl is still buggy as hell. No fix to self-cc and getting dmg when using it downhill on uneven ground.

Arc.9374:

Staff bunkers needed to be toned down.

Yes, but to this extent? This just killed staff bunker, as well as its other builds, and any other ele build that used a combo field.

I’m honestly shocked by the profession changes in this patch.

Elementalists had few good builds, and they nerfed them all. No more blasts on Evasive Arcana makes staff useless. No more gaining boons from auras gained through combo fields through Elemental Shielding or Zephyr’s boon makes aura builds much much worse.

Our Fire/Air trait lines are still very very weak. Earth’s only good for Written in Stone. Now Arcana is very weak as well with the change to Evasive Arcana.

Our damage builds do far less than any other class, and are by far the squishiest. Our support builds got hit super hard by this patch, and those builds are FAR less fun now without blast finishers from Evasive Arcana.

I love Elementalist, and honestly think they were close to balanced before this patch. There were issues, like having 30 in Arcana basically being almost mandatory, but those were fixable. Instead, Arenanet decided to nerf our only viable builds.

Even with all the new content…considering taking a break until Elementalist is fixed. More importantly, I’ve lost trust in the Arenanet balancing department.

TWMagimay.9057:

Wait, what? Torch is off-hand… It has it’s Phantasm)confusion/retaliation) just like every other offhand weapon and no clones, just like every other off-hand weapon. What it does have is a blast finisher and is a nice support weapon. Mesmers from my guild reported 2k+ with Prestige without counting the conditions…

Right, I forget about Phantasmal Mage as it’s so underwhelming, I hardly use it. The Prestige is the only reason to use Torch, IMO, and mainly for stealth because you have to do nothing (no damage) while using it.

As for the person you’re referring to that ’yay’ed stuff, it’s the same person you’re replying to (me). I indeed read the patch notes as I was reading the OP. The reason I ’yay’ed first was because people ‘boo hoo’ed first before actually researching too. Yeah it’s a bummer that Mist Form still doesn’t work…maybe it will work with the trait eventually…and maybe Tornado will be considered a cantrip or something. It really is an awful ability…

Still, it’s far and away removing the ONLY viable means of playing elementalist, this patch that is.

Another thing I’m noticing while playing, Soothing Mist seems to have a delay after attuning to water. It is either a glitch with the icon not appearing, or they put some sort of timer on it, but soothing mist does not show until after the regen on swapping or the fury on swapping that I’m granted…same with allies.

Yea, again you hated Staff eles so you are super happy about them getting nerfed into the ground.

Now us staff fans will all have to be D/D or S/D along side you.

That really helps to diversify builds, truely. /sarcasm.

@Arc – Bunker Staff Ele’s were some of the worst bunker-builds in the game. Yes, they are powerful, yes they can stall a point like mad, but compared to a Guardian or Warrior or Engineer bunker they are not even in the same league.

I won’t lie and try to tell you that I didn’t troll the hell outta people in WvW and sPvP with my bunker staff build I’m fairly certain I was the at the forefront of creating, because I trolled a lot of people on a lot of different servers. But a Warrior/Engi/Guardian bunker takes half the effort and is probably close to 1.5-2 times as effective. Without Evasive Arcana, the Warrior shout build is no ifs, ands, or buts about it, superior in every which way since we no longer have a reliable AoE healing source.

Tornado nerf is a joke, since it needed a serious buff to even be on par with other elite skills. And because I play D/D the evasive arcana nerf doesn’t effect me as much as staff players, but I still used it while might stacking on occasion. I think making it have no blast finishers at all was a bit harsh though. At the very least the earth roll should be a blast finisher, since the dagger skill it triggers already is one.

I think it would have been more appropriate to simply limit the blast finishers from that trait to once every ten seconds per attunement. This way if you wanted to blow your endurance and switch attunements (putting most/all of them on cd) to get a couple extra blast finishers, you could. But you couldn’t just sit in the same attunement, blow your endurance, and achieve the same result.

That being said, I am glad they didn’t choose to nerf Evasive Arcana in an entirely different way. If they nerfed the effects themselves, and not just the blast finishers, I probably would have cried upon reading that. As I said before, I play D/D, and sometimes in spvp matches dodge rolling in water attunement is all I can do to stay alive. And IMO it is in no way overpowered while not combined with a water combo field.

You guys don’t seem to realise that there’s a good chance all the bunker builds will eventually be tweaked downwards. That the Ele bunker got nerfed first is irrelevant and shortsighted. They have no place in the game. Period.

Survival oriented builds designed to buy time, sure. Almost immortal builds that require extreme dedication of manpower to drop in a timely fashion, no.

Sure, it would have been great to have all that happen in one patch, and I’m not arguing that the patch is kinda pathetic, given the state of the game right now, but you’re acting like you’ve been singled out above all else to receive the only bunker nerf that will ever happen in the entire history and future of the game.

It’s reasonable to assume that, if the developers are competant (the jury is still out on that one as far as I’m concerned) broken things will be fixed, and yet here we are, crying about how some broken stuff was fixed, like it’s some kind of massive surprise. The only surprise is that it took this long and that it wasn’t uniformly spread across all the offending classes, which I’ll not argue feels like a bit of a slight, but I would hope that what we’re seeing now is the beginning of them bringing a lot of classes into line as far as capabilities goes, in order to evaluate on a roughly even playing field, and then, if necessary, buff appropriately. If you’re too short-sighted to see the vague outline of a medium/long term goal for achieving overall balance, then I honestly don’t know what to say.

Goodbye Evasive Arcana. I had FUN while your combo finisher blasts lasted. Thank you for the wonderful playstyle you had offered which was unfortunately UNINTENDED.

What’s a good warrior build?

Arc.9374:

You guys don’t seem to realise that there’s a good chance all the bunker builds will eventually be tweaked downwards. That the Ele bunker got nerfed first is irrelevant and shortsighted. They have no place in the game. Period.

Survival oriented builds designed to buy time, sure. Almost immortal builds that require extreme dedication of manpower to drop in a timely fashion, no.

Sure, it would have been great to have all that happen in one patch, and I’m not arguing that the patch is kinda pathetic, given the state of the game right now, but you’re acting like you’ve been singled out above all else to receive the only bunker nerf that will ever happen in the entire history and future of the game.

It’s reasonable to assume that, if the developers are competant (the jury is still out on that one as far as I’m concerned) broken things will be fixed, and yet here we are, crying about how some broken stuff was fixed, like it’s some kind of massive surprise. The only surprise is that it took this long and that it wasn’t uniformly spread across all the offending classes, which I’ll not argue feels like a bit of a slight, but I would hope that what we’re seeing now is the beginning of them bringing a lot of classes into line as far as capabilities goes, in order to evaluate on a roughly even playing field, and then, if necessary, buff appropriately. If you’re too short-sighted to see the vague outline of a medium/long term goal for achieving overall balance, then I honestly don’t know what to say.

and what am i supposed to do for the month(s) it will take them to drop the stupid survivability of guardians down as well? play the weak version of a roaming thief?
and what about the fun that playstyle provided.You were wasting a kittening dodge roll for god’s shake..high risk for high reward
its so bad having such a great playstyle being created by mistake

you know im totally ok with being on the bottom of the food chain as long as im having fun..but that nerf wasnt a numbers nerf.It actually nerfed FUN :o

Aww kitten Really sad to hear about the evasive arcana nerf, I felt as if it kind of rewarded creative play and situational awareness (hey look a water field with allies nearby on low health; let me just roll into that while changing to water attunement).

If the other thread about the ninja nerf to combo field aura’s is true then… kitten I might stop using D/D in favour of S/D. I miss my might stacking already

Arc, as much I agree that staff ele needed nerfing and that this was too much, just who the kittening hell are you to tell what sort of builds have a place in the game?

You guys don’t seem to realise that there’s a good chance all the glass cannon builds will eventually be tweaked downwards. That the Ele glass got nerfed first is irrelevant and shortsighted. They have no place in the game. Period.

See, that would make as much sense as your version. Builds have place in the game, you can nerf them to make them less efficient, but these changes downright kill the build.

Air magic traits “Inscription” still not working with Elite Glyph of Elements…. can’t believe they left that out for so long!

Lol. Wow.

The reaction of people was expected. Very much so.

I’m not going to say anything (+ or -) until I actually get to play post-patch.

Leo G.4501:

Right, I forget about Phantasmal Mage as it’s so underwhelming, I hardly use it. The Prestige is the only reason to use Torch, IMO, and mainly for stealth because you have to do nothing (no damage) while using it.

Well, that is your issue. I use it to give chaos armour to everybody and that useless retaliation from the mage has saved my party in dungeons often enough. But your preference or mine doesn’t matter, rally, it’s still a buff.

As for the person you’re referring to that ’yay’ed stuff, it’s the same person you’re replying to (me). I indeed read the patch notes as I was reading the OP. The reason I ’yay’ed first was because people ‘boo hoo’ed first before actually researching too. Yeah it’s a bummer that Mist Form still doesn’t work…maybe it will work with the trait eventually…and maybe Tornado will be considered a cantrip or something. It really is an awful ability…

Oh, sorry bout that, didn’t feel like checking names and went with the more general approach.
The 6th reply in this very topic mentions that the fix didn’t work. Which is what I meant with not reading. You know that picture of the black guy shouting “Read the * topic before you ** post”? That just came to mind when I saw the YAY. And the “eventually” is what bothers most people. It’s mostly the disappointment, I think. People read the notes and expected 60s cd, they logged in and tooltip said 60s cd. And then…75s cd….

Still, it’s far and away removing the ONLY viable means of playing elementalist, this patch that is.

Oh, that I completely agree with. As I said, none of the changes actually affect my gameplay in any way. I do just fine and will continue doing so(unless Written in Stone gets some weird “fix” in which case…hello, mesmer!). I also dun understand why staff should be useless now…but, meh, that’s an argument one can’t win….