Guild Wars 2

Here’s the dev’s comments from three weeks ago:

Oh ya, wanted to add: yes, we’re watching Mesmers, bunker Guardians and tank heal Ele’s. Forgot to add that.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Having said that, Dagger/dagger Ele needs help. Some defensive Ele specs are too good. Some of their sustained damage is too low, while some spike builds are pretty rough. Keeping an eye on it means we’re not going to nerf/buff it without thinking very carefully about it – that’s what my first update was about.

Karl McLain.5604:

We do have some improvements in mind for the elementalist’s main-hand dagger, along with reworking the downed state a bit. Keep in mind that you might not see this for a bit, but it is in the works.

D/D and downed state have gotten their share of changes since then, and we’re left with comments that imply what might come next.

Out of boredom, we can always try to interpret them. Here’s what I think:

Oh ya, wanted to add: yes, we’re watching Mesmers, bunker Guardians and tank heal Ele’s. (…) Some defensive Ele specs are too good.

• This one is pretty obvious, bunker eles are being targetted for balance. My guess is that this is about staff healers who can’t kill nor die, which is against the combat philosophy for this game.

Some of their sustained damage is too low

• For sustained damage, the biggest offender seems to be focus’ fire skillset. Its generally considered to be a weak set, and it happens to be all about burning (= sustained damage). It could also apply to several lacking burning/ bleeding traits.

while some spike builds are pretty rough.

• If there’s one thing I can define as rough about power builds for elementalists, it’s the fire/ air traits. Elementalist’s spike skills are pretty polished and well-defined, bugs aside, but elementalists usually rely on water/ arcane traits because that’s where their good traits are, and with good synergy. When we look at fire’s traitline, we see a bunch of generic, highly conditional +damage traits with no creative or meaningful synergy between them. Nothing like, say, water’s traits that add regeneration and add condition removal per regeneration. And nothing that actually makes us survive while we’re spiking, or else power elementalists are basically thieves without stealth, which means we’re dead in 3 seconds. It’s a pretty rough traitline.

Whole bunch of speculation there. Given that we just got a series of buffs I would say those are probably just the start. Anets first pass at rebalancing the class after the long series of mega nerfs. I think they realize that they obviously overnerfed the heck out of the class and are having that “oh crap” moment. Overall I think Anet has proven that they totally suck at class balance.

boozer.7815:

Whole bunch of speculation there.

Speculation is the whole point of this topic, as the topic title implies.

I predict that…

1. D/D Buff
2. Bunker Nerf
3. HP Buff
4. Elite Buff
5. S/D Buff
6. Focus Buff
7. Staff Buff
8. Trait Line Buff

D/D has already had a nice buff, I’m not sure if they’ll go any further with that aside from fixing some of the bugs within this weapon set.

Imo what needs to hapkitten quite clear. At least regarding pvp.

Our bunker builds need to be nerfed. If I spec full bunker even against 2 good players, I won’t die, ever. Unless I royally screw up. I won’t be killing them either, it’s just a game of who “gives up” first.

I’m a scepter/dagger player mostly, so I might be biased in saying that’s our weapon combo that needs the most help – especially in the damage department.
Flame tooth will not hit anyone, and in the off chance that it does, it provides pathetic damage vs the difficulty of actually landing it.
Phoenix falls into the “awesome” department due to the cleansing it provides, however it can only be used as a melee range spell due to how slow it travels (and again, quite subpar damage compared to other classes)
And I could go on and on – with the obvious culprit being the low damage.

Elementalists need to have their survivability reduced in full tank specs and at the same time they need to have their survivability increased in full offensive specs.

Not only that the damage in our full tank specs should be slightly increased to acompany the survivability nerf, and the damage in our full offensive specs needs to be massively increased, for it to be worth taking.