Guild Wars 2

Arc.9374:

I can’t believe you guys are crying about them fixing something that was never intended.

So you want them to only fix the Ele bugs that are detrimental to play, and just gloss over the ones that provide convenient benefit?

How anyone could think that getting blast finishers wasn’t a blatant bug is beyond me. All it takes is 10 seconds of cross-refencing the skills you’re supposed to get according to the tooltip with whether or not they’re blast finishers, and if you’d done that, you’d see that the only one is churning earth, which, had it worked as it should have, would have given you one blast every 10 seconds, at max.

Instead you got a blast every time you dodged into a field, with no internal cooldown, and irrespective of what attunement you were in, and you thought that was just going to slide by?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would have been awesome if they’d actually fixed the whole trait so that it worked as described, rather than half-baking it like this, but you can’t seriously believe that Evasive Arcana was going to remain in the state it was in, when it was clearly completely unintended.

And then you have the nerve to complain about it?

The problem is it created a whole playstyle. A deep one at that. And to just up and take a whole playstyle away is disheartening. They should have sat back and said ok this is a playstyle but not intended how can we properly balance it. Not “Sorry bout your luck..hope you like daggers..lol!l!!l!L” Other MMOs have done it why not Anet.

TWMagimay.9057:

Gibbc.8502:

TWMagimay.9057:

Since the -curses quietly- devs decided the game doesn;t need a healer, why would you expect to be one?

What game have you been playing? 3 of my 6 guys are healers. Sure it’s a little complicated but totally doable.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/ This game. What about you? And if it’s totally doable, what’s with all the QQ in this topic? If it’s doable, go do it….duhhhh….

Well, staff support is still odable, but now it reuires stationary target for heals to work…which means someone tanking a mob.

So now we have tanks and healers….

people were having fun in ways not intended by ANet so the devs had to intervene.

Arc.9374:

I can’t believe you guys are crying about them fixing something that was never intended.

So you want them to only fix the Ele bugs that are detrimental to play, and just gloss over the ones that provide convenient benefit?

How anyone could think that getting blast finishers wasn’t a blatant bug is beyond me. All it takes is 10 seconds of cross-refencing the skills you’re supposed to get according to the tooltip with whether or not they’re blast finishers, and if you’d done that, you’d see that the only one is churning earth, which, had it worked as it should have, would have given you one blast every 10 seconds, at max.

Instead you got a blast every time you dodged into a field, with no internal cooldown, and irrespective of what attunement you were in, and you thought that was just going to slide by?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would have been awesome if they’d actually fixed the whole trait so that it worked as described, rather than half-baking it like this, but you can’t seriously believe that Evasive Arcana was going to remain in the state it was in, when it was clearly completely unintended.

And then you have the nerve to complain about it?

Well if you played stafff you would get it. Originally we though the bug (where every dodge roll was blast finisher) would be nerfed now we know that they intended for us to not have access to them at all through EA. As far as the meta game goes this hurts staff a lot.

The thing you have to understand is that we are decent as a community we trade builds discuss and usually were pretty peaceful around here. Anet manged to nerf the vast majority of us past where we thought we were getting nerfed. Many of us argued that the skill should be fixed. Many of us never exploited it. Right now EA is nigh worth less outside of water.

Right now EA has no blast and is piss poor as a 30 point skill. Your anger surprises me considering it killed many builds around here. Look I am going to get over it a redo my build but honestly your anger is a troll all of its own.

Dodge blast finishers were fun. They weren’t especially powerful, but they sure were fun.

In the patch notes, I see 3 not-as-documented changes.

For Healing Rain and Armor of Earth, they changed the tooltip and left the skill worse-than-described.

For Evasive Arcana, they made the trait strictly worse.

On the plus side, Warriors got a damage buff to one skill and 5 new combo finishers. Yay.

I should have known better than to make an Elementalist in a Guild Wars game. I still remember when they gutted Ether Renewal in GW and when they changed AI to severely limit AoE.

You can’t ignore the fact that Evasive Arcana was too powerful and mighty like it was. Don’t get me wrong – I completely understand your frustration as this build introduced some new levels of fun for me. Dodging is mostly a good feeling in any case. Having a blast finisher along with it also brought an amazing deal of pleasure, no argument there. But… it was still imba when used with all the proper gear, traits and rotation. I was throwing unbelievable amounts of boons and heals for my party and it was all done on a fresh lv 80 toon, w/o full exotic gear or any of the runes for boon duration. In some cases I was able to get to 25 stacks of might and when my group was consisted of 2 or 3 melee chars – it was a great improvement.

When you scrutinize it you realize that it did too much:

• Blasts without an internal cooldown;
• The ability to produce AoE boons for might, swiftness, regeneration, protection, resilience, frost armor, an AoE heal, AoE conditions;
• It actually closed the gap for melee characters in dungeons. You know how everyone is complaining about melee toons always being at disadvantage in PvE – this trait improved on this by a lot;
• In combination with staff this trait provides TOO much support out of one character. In reality this build was superior to a 30/30/x glass cannon build, making the actual full-on-dps build not viable. Why would you roll it, when you can still deal large amounts of dps and have the best support for your team? In other words it summarized the PvE state of the class with one build, which is never a good sign of balance.

I side by you on your quest to get a response from Anet. I don’t expect them to roll back the changes, but I am surely interested enough in reading a blog post, or a simple forum post by them, explaining the reasoning behind their decisions so far. They have done that before and it works well. Some of us cannot simply grasp the depth of an MMO’s balance. Some reason will emerge as soon as they make an effort to communicate with the classes they’ve affected. It’d be wonderful if the dev team wrote in the forums to all classes on a more regular basis.

It annoys me that people consistently find the dumbest stuff to complain about, without thinking the implications of what they’re saying through.

So Evasive Arcana is now completely useless (no arguments from me there). In the grand scheme of things, it can go sit alongside our other dozens of useless traits/utilities/elites, and that’s a shame, but if anything, it’s not like the Ele community is any stranger to having it a bit harder than other classes.

Most of the people still playing it are doing so because the effort:reward ratios actually aren’t really that far off balance (overall). If they simply fixed all the stuff that was broken and not working properly, we’d be in good shape. If they balanced all the stuff that wasn’t used because it’s inferior to alternative options, we’d be in really good shape.

Evasive Arcana was (and still is) bugged. Knowingly or not, people designed builds around a bugged skill, and then a bunch of other people bandwagoned on and started using them, which is fine, except for this notion that because a bunch of people were abusing a bug it should never be fixed, and they should just throw us this bone because we’re weak in other area’s.

So it’s kinda frustrating to see the double standard when it comes to detrimental bugs vs beneficial bugs.

Blast finishers on dodge were fun. Maybe not optimal, maybe not the most practical thing ever, sure as hell not overpowered; but they were fun.

I can’t see any reason for this change, nor do I expect ANet to listen to us or communicate effectively.

/seconded. I feel like the black sheep class of the game, right at the bottom of the devs’ to-do list —- unless of course another class complains that we can actually do one or two things well. Then the nerfs come, fast and brutal.

they designed builds around it because they were good and they worked and they were fun. just goes to show how sad our traits are, people discovered good builds that were fun to play… come to find out they were never intended.

Meh, it seems like the people complaining about Staff Eles complaining are DD eles. You don’t know what it’s like to have the CORE aspect of your kittening class get removed. Heals and blast finishers were vital to Staff Ele builds. All of them. Sure, I kind of knew EA would get toned down, but not removed outright. Also, we expected a buff to compensate. But all we got are stupid conjure buffs. Sigh.

Sigh.

Party wide? Yeah if they all stand on top of each other, in which case any aoe buff would be “party wide”. In case you haven’t realized, range is kind f important on an aoe, it’s not gonna be hitting the whole party.

it’s your fault for having unintended fun. shame on you. you should feel bad.

/signed. I want to know how the hell I’m going to convince people to bring me along for dungeons now.

as another poster rightly mentioned ea just needed a global 10 sec timer. the blast finisher wasnt what was op since there is risk in wasting dodges and getting into melee range. what was op was that it was spammable when changing attunenents. now it is mostly useless save for a water roll. d/d ea i will surely miss you. you could have been balancdd but instead you’ve been made irrelevant.

Bhima.9518:

as another poster rightly mentioned ea just needed a global 10 sec timer. the blast finisher wasnt what was op since there is risk in wasting dodges and getting into melee range. what was op was that it was spammable when changing attunenents. now it is mostly useless save for a water roll. d/d ea i will surely miss you. you could have been balancdd but instead you’ve been made irrelevant.

It was just spammable, every dodge counted as a finisher.

That´s the reason people were expecting it to be toned down to happen only with actual spells…or with global cooldown.

I couldn’t get the cleansing wave effect while in water attunement, but the other attunement work. Is this trait still bugged?

Arc.9374:

I can’t believe you guys are crying about them fixing something that was never intended.

So you want them to only fix the Ele bugs that are detrimental to play, and just gloss over the ones that provide convenient benefit?

How anyone could think that getting blast finishers wasn’t a blatant bug is beyond me. All it takes is 10 seconds of cross-refencing the skills you’re supposed to get according to the tooltip with whether or not they’re blast finishers, and if you’d done that, you’d see that the only one is churning earth, which, had it worked as it should have, would have given you one blast every 10 seconds, at max.

Instead you got a blast every time you dodged into a field, with no internal cooldown, and irrespective of what attunement you were in, and you thought that was just going to slide by?

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would have been awesome if they’d actually fixed the whole trait so that it worked as described, rather than half-baking it like this, but you can’t seriously believe that Evasive Arcana was going to remain in the state it was in, when it was clearly completely unintended.

And then you have the nerve to complain about it?

Then give me a blast finisher for my Churning Earth after dodging and not a poke in the mob’s kitten with kittening cripple and 1 stack of bleed. Fire,Water,Air, i don’t care. But earth too? WTK? (What the Kitten)

BFNK.6748:

You can’t ignore the fact that Evasive Arcana was too powerful and mighty like it was.

It wasn’t that powerful. It was functional.

Strang.8170:

TWMagimay.9057:

Gibbc.8502:

TWMagimay.9057:

Since the -curses quietly- devs decided the game doesn;t need a healer, why would you expect to be one?

What game have you been playing? 3 of my 6 guys are healers. Sure it’s a little complicated but totally doable.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/ This game. What about you? And if it’s totally doable, what’s with all the QQ in this topic? If it’s doable, go do it….duhhhh….

Well, staff support is still odable, but now it reuires stationary target for heals to work…which means someone tanking a mob.

So now we have tanks and healers….

As opposed to before when you could…do what?! I seriously have no idea what stationary target you need and for what exactly.

There are only 2 class developers for all 8 classes. We aren’t going to see any improvements or dev interaction any time soon. They are too busy buffing warriors. Anet has a seriously small, understaffed and 1 dimensionally focused class dev team.

Too busy hiring new content developers and not enough time fixing the broken parts of the game.

For the record I would love some developer engagement on a meaningful level but its probably not going to happen.

So presumably one of those two guys (and I agree it’s ridiculous that there are only two of them) is responsible for Ele’s. Is it really so much to ask for him to pop by and talk with us? Maybe once a week or so would be a good start?

I usually don’t weigh in on these issues but this really has removed one of the most engaging and versatile mechanics of the elementalist. Elementalist was designed as a high skill cap, high risk/reward class; Evasive Arcana was the ultimate culmination of this. It was amazingly fun and rewarding when used correctly to trigger fields, and the corner stone of many of our more entertaining builds (Both Staff Support and D/D might stack). Without meaningful auto-attacks the Elementalist is already behind the 8-ball and now without the fun aspect of EA we’re left with a boring and not particularly efficacious class.

I can understand the blast finishers were originally unintended, but they were great! Hopefully any dev reading this can appreciate the community response and realise what a great draw it was to the Elementalist class.

Chaede.7348:

There are only 2 class developers for all 8 classes. We aren’t going to see any improvements or dev interaction any time soon. They are too busy buffing warriors. Anet has a seriously small, understaffed and 1 dimensionally focused class dev team.

Too busy hiring new content developers and not enough time fixing the broken parts of the game.

For the record I would love some developer engagement on a meaningful level but its probably not going to happen.

I do feel it’s important to note, neither one of those two spoken of actually play Elementalist as a main nor highly thought of alt.

1. plays a Ranger and Guardian
2. plays a Warrior and a Mesmer

More than 1 dodge finisher per 10 sec CD: yes, broken…needed fix.

Instead of adjusting it to only proc every 10 secs, they removed it entirely.

Clear to me, those 2 devs do not even play this class. Rumor has it, they play wars so yea guess who got major buffs this patch? Hint: starts with the letter W.

Guess who got nerfed into the ground? Hint: starts with the letter E.

Whatever, they have not talked to us in the past and will not do so in the future. Just accept that this is a bottom of the barrel class that is used as something to nerf every patch just cus it’s funny.

And they didn’t waste anytime fixing the ranger bug tonight. Granted, that was unintended, but we deserve something. I couldn’t even bring myself to play tonight. I want to know what there reasoning is. I think that would make any reasonable person feel better.

TWMagimay.9057:

Strang.8170:

TWMagimay.9057:

Gibbc.8502:

TWMagimay.9057:

Since the -curses quietly- devs decided the game doesn;t need a healer, why would you expect to be one?

What game have you been playing? 3 of my 6 guys are healers. Sure it’s a little complicated but totally doable.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/ This game. What about you? And if it’s totally doable, what’s with all the QQ in this topic? If it’s doable, go do it….duhhhh….

Well, staff support is still odable, but now it reuires stationary target for heals to work…which means someone tanking a mob.

So now we have tanks and healers….

As opposed to before when you could…do what?! I seriously have no idea what stationary target you need and for what exactly.

Stationary target because you need to prepare your heal with eruption for it to be worth anything, and with cast times that´s good 2-3 second process. on top of that with recuded finisher amount, you´ll need to make sure people stay in your heals.

As opposed to before when you could see people on low health (usualy running franticly), throw a field towards them and cap off with dual finisher(dodge+arcane wave). Kept you both mobile, didn´t require recipient to set up a camp inside your heal and rewarded skillful play and observation.

/Signed. I am with you all.

I thought it was totally fair to trade endurance for blast finishers, it was the only way to get enough might stacks to do anything worthwhile damage wise :/ I knew a nerf was coming but I didn’t expect removing an entire playstyle :/

Just make it one blast per attunement ? or just 1 every 10 seconds ? This is too harsh without some other buff to make up for it.

The blast finishers on EA weren’t entirely OP. You had to use your dodges to get them. Risk vs. reward. Many times I have included a double dodge through RoF for the 6 stacks only to get a solid beatdown for wasting my dodges. It was always a decision to make.

Strang.8170:

Stationary target because you need to prepare your heal with eruption for it to be worth anything, and with cast times that´s good 2-3 second process. on top of that with recuded finisher amount, you´ll need to make sure people stay in your heals.

As opposed to before when you could see people on low health (usualy running franticly), throw a field towards them and cap off with dual finisher(dodge+arcane wave). Kept you both mobile, didn´t require recipient to set up a camp inside your heal and rewarded skillful play and observation.

Oh, I see. Because, obviously, team play is for noobs and not the skillful gameplay of 1 person doing everything. I always lay my fields on those who need them, they finish them themselves and magic happens. Guess I’m just not as good as you are. Point being, you created a playstyle that wasn;t supposed to exist based on a trait that was clearly bugged. And now it’s “harder”. -pause for a duhhhh-

The bug created an entire set of play styles that revolved around it. What’s more is that is was actually a ton of fun just to use; rolling around into different combo fields and creating all of these awesome combo effects made you feel powerful. Granted, being able to spam blast finishers really quickly with multiple rolls was definitely a bit much in PvE and you could do some ridiculous things like super fast mass AoE healing, but saying “hey, we’re gonna take probably one of the most engagIng things you can do and completely remove it from the game” rather than saying “hey, the community found something cool, let’s see if we can balance it while keeping the style of play and feeling it evokes alive” just seems like complete kitten

I have an 80 warrior and an 80 thief, and the single reason I bothered to level an ele to 80 was because I played around with evasive arcana in the mists with dummies and found it pretty interesting. I spent a bunch of gold just last week after hitting 80 on a full set of knights armor, with the idea that I would basically go s/f and be in melee virtually 100% of the time, and rely on might stacking to make up for the power lost by going knights as well as help be a bigger asset to my team. I did it, and it was incredibly fun to get the build rolling. Doing the might dance in tune with actually dodging potential one shots was a lot more engaging than backstab spamming or pressing 2 on my warrior.

At the very least, I’d like to at least see the skill reverted in PvE, if the earth roll isn’t altered back to be a churning earth (blast finisher). There should be NOBODY who objects to that.

Maybe Churning Earth (Dagger5) was also an unintended blast. Skill animation doesn’t look “blasty” to me. Remove blast finisher of that skill next patch?

So like with my support gear full exo (heal/power/toughness).

Earth roll does: 79 dmg and 19 dmg a tick bleed.
Fire roll does: 16 dmg and 134 dmg a tick fire.

Other than the water heal, EA is absolutely terrible now.

Well at least it’s consistant: all our 30 pt traits are now crappy across the board.

edit. forgot to mention EA still does not work under water. Fun!

I like how a theif can still spam 6 bombs using short bow 2 and we get nerfed from maybe using 2 or 3 “unintended” blast finishers at a time

This nerf was unnecessary. The whole boon battery mantra created from EA kept eles interesting for me. It was MUCH more intense and satisfying when fighting with staff to manage your energy & utilize blast finishers to help your team. It was a role no one else could provide.

At least give us blast finishers on our EA spell activation or this trait is completely worthless.

Great ANet you just destroy the last trait line and fun I really enjoyed as DD creating combos to get power stacks with skill. it wasn’t easy but it was FUN.

Time to find another game and stop buying gems. thanks

Good luck getting anet to reply to this or even look at this.

I’m just going to level my warrior with 5 new combo finishers now.

In all honesty our class needs a huge trait overhall.. it needs to be redone from the group up :/

I have to agree, I would like to know what the developers vision for this class is. After trying to be effective with DPS builds I came to the conclusion that it is intended we are more for a support class. Now that our ability to support got taken down a few notches…what do we have left?

I would be interested to know where the devs are going with the elementalist, as right now it feels like we are lost in the sea of classes. We can’t do the spike DPS of htieves or Warriors, nor the Condition damage of Necros, or even have the versatility of Engineers. It seems we are supposed to be able to be versatile, but without being able to shine at anything, we are left lost in the dark.

Mik.1324:

In all honesty our class needs a huge trait overhall.. it needs to be redone from the group up :/

I don’t think its quite that bad…I think most of us love the quick gameplay that the class offers, but we need to be able to stand out in some fashion like other classes do.

BFNK.6748:

You can’t ignore the fact that Evasive Arcana was too powerful and mighty like it was. Don’t get me wrong – I completely understand your frustration as this build introduced some new levels of fun for me. Dodging is mostly a good feeling in any case. Having a blast finisher along with it also brought an amazing deal of pleasure, no argument there. But… it was still imba when used with all the proper gear, traits and rotation. I was throwing unbelievable amounts of boons and heals for my party and it was all done on a fresh lv 80 toon, w/o full exotic gear or any of the runes for boon duration. In some cases I was able to get to 25 stacks of might and when my group was consisted of 2 or 3 melee chars – it was a great improvement.

When you scrutinize it you realize that it did too much:

• Blasts without an internal cooldown;
• The ability to produce AoE boons for might, swiftness, regeneration, protection, resilience, frost armor, an AoE heal, AoE conditions;
• It actually closed the gap for melee characters in dungeons. You know how everyone is complaining about melee toons always being at disadvantage in PvE – this trait improved on this by a lot;
• In combination with staff this trait provides TOO much support out of one character. In reality this build was superior to a 30/30/x glass cannon build, making the actual full-on-dps build not viable. Why would you roll it, when you can still deal large amounts of dps and have the best support for your team? In other words it summarized the PvE state of the class with one build, which is never a good sign of balance.

I side by you on your quest to get a response from Anet. I don’t expect them to roll back the changes, but I am surely interested enough in reading a blog post, or a simple forum post by them, explaining the reasoning behind their decisions so far. They have done that before and it works well. Some of us cannot simply grasp the depth of an MMO’s balance. Some reason will emerge as soon as they make an effort to communicate with the classes they’ve affected. It’d be wonderful if the dev team wrote in the forums to all classes on a more regular basis.

What viable glass cannon build ? can you show me a viable glass cannon build for elementalist? I would love to see a video from you without dying almost all the time using DD in PvE or sPvP.

I aggre about blasts without an internal cooldown had to be fixed but fully destroying the last viable build…
Even if only the evasive arcana in earth attunment still creates a finisher blast would be fine

Toloth.1765:

Mik.1324:

In all honesty our class needs a huge trait overhall.. it needs to be redone from the group up :/

I don’t think its quite that bad…I think most of us love the quick gameplay that the class offers, but we need to be able to stand out in some fashion like other classes do.

We do. Our skills are flashy. Beat that.

On topic:
Is Churning Earth an UNINTENDED BLAST FINISHER or not? I would like an official response from whoever fixed the God forsaken Evasive Arcana Trait.

O.o no Dev. loves Elementalist T.T
I know this class is not for beginners although this is my first class i picked and have yet to actually spend any kind of time on an alt but come on. How hard or complex do you want to make this class. Or are you just trying to eliminate the remaining Elementalist from the game, so you can then cut the class completely out of the game? Seriously what is the point of anyone picking Elementalist. Here I can answer it so they can have fun, but you are taking the fun out of it with each patch.

TWMagimay.9057:

Oh, I see. Because, obviously, team play is for noobs and not the skillful gameplay of 1 person doing everything. I always lay my fields on those who need them, they finish them themselves and magic happens. Guess I’m just not as good as you are. Point being, you created a playstyle that wasn;t supposed to exist based on a trait that was clearly bugged. And now it’s “harder”. -pause for a duhhhh-

I think you are missing the point here. 1 person doing everything isn’t the Idea. Elementalist have problems in comparison to other classes. We dont deal nearly as much damage as many and dont have the survivability skills or armor as others. This one trait and the builds that used it to its fullest potential are what put Eles back on the horse a month ago when people were looking at dropping the class altogether. There hasn’t been a buff to address the reason why the majority of Ele’s have gone Bunker with this trait. Most of us rolled the class to be ranged Glass cannons. We want to be that. but the way the game was developed has pushed us into this bunker stuff. It also happens that Bunker staff Ele’s also happened to be one of the best group supporters around. We cant deal as much damage, and no one can tank so it was a go to build for anyone that experimented even a little.

Now they have nerfed multiple aspects of those builds, not just EA but also the healing, and runes often used with those builds.

But we have nothing in return. Sure you can talk about how you PVE fine and that may be true because PvE isn’t exactly difficult but in any competitive environment you will find us lagging behind other classes more and more if things like this continue. If the devs dont want Elementalist to be bunkers fine. but give us something… what are we supposed to be? We aren’t high burst, we aren’t high sustained, we were high defense… but that is gone now. There is a clear divide in sPvP/tPvP between the top tier classes and the classes that are just ok… And Ele’s just dropped back down to the ok pool while many of the top tier classes were buffed. This is why people are upset.

You play staff aa its supposed to be, without bugs

You think if we bombarded the “Contact us” portion of this page about the lack of communication/reliability of our so called “2 ele devs” they might take a look at what exacticaly is going on here?

No, u switch to D/D or S/D.

I drop any AoE field on people and they will automatically all scramble to get out of it; enemies and friends alike. At least with EA I had sum sorta control, now I have none so no point really using a staff. Other weapons sets are superior now.

terrordrone.1875:

Good luck getting anet to reply to this or even look at this.

I’m just going to level my warrior with 5 new combo finishers now.

lmao, so true.

Seems the only way to progress is to flip a coin between Warrior and Guardian. Anet devotes so much more attention to Greatswords and has such loving affection for the two previously mentioned professions it’s unreal. But alas, time for ez mode rather than carpel tunnel during Ele play for minuscule results.

hidden.9743:

You think if we bombarded the “Contact us” portion of this page about the lack of communication/reliability of our so called “2 ele devs” they might take a look at what exacticaly is going on here?

Most likely not, although I am going to keep this thread alive until one of their people responds, and everyone else should, too.

When there is a disconnect between the players and the development team, major issues will arise sooner or later. Also, brute-forcing the changes they made is not the best way to keep the player base supporting their actions.