Guild Wars 2

Those spells would have been so much more balanced if they adjusted the spells to the tooltips instead of adjusting the tooltips to the spells. True

Nonetheless i think Evasive Arcana needed to be nerfed. Though as it is atm, its totally useless. At least they might have kept Evasive Arcana causing a blast effect with a general (not attunement based nor being able to proc twice) cooldown of 10 seconds.

There’s nothing more i can say that hasn’t been said already, but I just wanted to add my opinion as well.

I’m sure most of us were expecting a nerf, because having a blast finisher on every dodge seemed unintended and possibly exploitable. You can potentially stack up heals, etc. much faster than intended, but still, I never felt it was overly OP. Like others have mentioned, you must sacrifice survivability in order to gain these boons, and that in itself, balances out the trait. It’s a risk vs reward decision that players have to commit to.

But to have blasts be removed completely was going WAY too far. Including a 10s CD per attunement like how each of the skill procs per attunement is a much more reasonable and expected nerf. Removing it completely simplifies and severely nerfs playstyles (for all weapon combinations, including Staff), and it’s the reason why there’s such an uproar. It makes the playstyle we’ve chosen less fun, because it’s removing a viable tactic.

Not to mention, the skill itself felt very poorly balanced in usefulness/power between attunements. For a 30 pt trait, dodges in Fire and Earth are pathetically weak. Their PBAOE radius is way too small to hit anything if you’re dodging away, and even if you do, it does paltry damage (less than your autoattack even). The only two good attunement dodges are in Air and Water. Even in Water, the heal amount is equivalent to the 15 pt minor trait (Healing Ripple) in the water tree, except with the addition of a condition removal (though you do have to sacrifice endurance for it unlike Healing Ripple).

I’m personally a D/D Ele, but I’ve already felt like it was a huge blow. I really pity Staff users who used EA as a major part of their build, because the nerf undoubtedly hit them harder. I’m assuming the nerf was intended to hit bunker builds in sPvP, but the end result was it crippled all types of players in both PvE and PvP. To add insult to injury, other class bunker builds were, for the most part, barely touched in this patch.

Its my understanding that Elementalists are one of the classes that has the fewest trait speccing options in the game. So why would they go ahead and remove another one from out arsenal?

I play a support Ele, and I loved it. I could throw out some solid healing with evasive arcana blast finishers, or give some really nice might stacks to my allies. Removing the blast finishers is just stupid, they oughta just make it work as intended for cryin out loud. How the hell can I really play a support Ele now? Our healing is pretty pathetic even when geared for it, and we cant exactly stack might all that high without evasive arcana blast finishers.

This is seriously depressing news. =\

EA was a gimmick, never intended to trigger blast finisher (obviously). Staff elementalist, while having an access to a variety of fields, is supposed to be paired with warrior for instance so he could trigger those combos. And that’s how teamwork works. You werent suppose to trigger them by yourself. The problem is most of those warriors/guas/whatever are oblivious to that fact and think that spamming 2 on GS is a way to go. It’s a L2P issue.

A class should in no way rely on another class for it to be effective. Being able to do EA blast finishers in a row without changing attunement could be percieved as over the top (it really wasnt at all) but removing them completly is simply ridiculous.

I mean churning earth is itself a blast finisher, they could have atleast left that in there. But not, over the top nerf to a not overpowered ability used by a not even close to overpowered profession. I noticed that there were hardly any nerfs to thief damage potential, so im not really sure wtf anet is even doing, besides apparently massive amounts of hard drugs.

Combos relies on other proffesions, that’s their whole point.

EA wasn’t casting churning earth but a modifed version of shockwave, the animation is a leftover from a previous version that had churning earth (and updraft in air attunement) but was deemed to powerful and changed.

And please refrain from criticising Anet’s dev team, so far they’ve been doing a splendid work, just check this new lovely content.

If combos relied on other professions, we wouldnt be able to do them ourselves at all. I always thought that Elementalists were designed around being combo’ers, supplying allies with boons of various types to supplement teammates capabilities in lieu of the fact that Elementalists are a fairly weak class both offensivly and/or defensivly. The design of the class seems to fit with this mentality, imo atleast.

I doubt the profession dev team is the same as the team thats creating the new content, but if it is then I think they do need to be criticized. This is the second time that ive seen them unnecessarily nerf an elementalist ability that allowed us to fill the support role, into the ground. Glyph of Renewal being the first, which was hardly an overpowered ability at all, is now completly worthless, and theyve done the same with Evasive Arcana. I like filling the support role, and I like the general design of the Elementalist, but at this rate im going to be forced to play another profession because they do damage/survival alot better than the Ele, and the Ele will no longer be able to support.

I feel like there are more important matters for them to be addressing than apparent “bugs” with Elementalist abilities that are nowhere near overpowered or gamebreaking.

pls bring it back

kostbabis.8791:

pls bring it back

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Remember that they removed the blast finisher (completely) from Dragon’s Tooth too.

Now there are only 2 combo finishers (total) outside of Earth Attunement and utility slots (Comet and Phoenix are the remaining two).

If I was a betting man, I’d wager ANet will remove them (without comment, naturally) in an upcoming “fix”.

You can trigger fields but that’s because all proffesions should be self-sufficient. If you want 1v1 spec, staff isn’t an answer anymore.

I keep coming back to the forums to see some change, but there never is any (apart from bad changes). I guess a part of me still lingers to play guild wars 2, which is not surprising as I was hyped for years and I was going to play for years. But after less than 3 months it’s already done. I wish they had taken another direction, but it’s their game after all.

haviz.1340:

EA was a gimmick, never intended to trigger blast finisher (obviously).

It was very much intended to be a blast finisher. They did some rather big work on the trait in late beta. If it wasn’t supposed to be a blast finisher, then they would definitely have fixed it at that time.

The whole “unintended” is simply yet another Anet lie and if in anything it pisses me of more than the actual change. It was a completely unneeded word that was put into the patch notes only because they needed an excuse as they expected these threads from the start.

Obviously unintended? Have you SEEN the animation on churning earth?

Wildclaw.6073:

• Armor Of Earth didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Healing Rain didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Churning Earth didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Phoenix didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip
• Evasive Arcana didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Nerf it to hell.

So my question isn’t why Evasive Arcana was nerfed. obviously that blash finisher was unintended.

My question is why Churning Earth, Phoenix, Armor of Earth and Healing Rain were nerfed to hell. Because using the same logic, it was obviously unintended for Phoenix to only have 5s vigor, and unintended for Churning Earth to not explode when you released the 5 button.

This. Basically what it amounts to is, Anet is really lazy in terms of fixing this game. Instead of fixing the skills to work as intended by the tooltip, they nerf the skills to match the description in the tooltip and pass it off as a “fix.”

Oh, and mist form still doesn’t have a reduced cooldown when traited, even though it is in the patch notes. Fix the “bugs” that help us (Evasive arcana) but not the ones that hurt us huh?

haviz.1340:

You can trigger fields but that’s because all proffesions should be self-sufficient. If you want 1v1 spec, staff isn’t an answer anymore.

Totally untrue. You posted before that it was a LTP issue and now your back tracking. Why? You were correct in the first place.

Psst! We have a blast finisher in earth line that synergizes very well with everything we have. Its called Eruption. That is our bread and butter finisher along with Arcane Blast. They are what I have been using for a long time now and they work just fine. Staff is VERY viable in Wv3 and PvE without EA. It always has been. EA was an exploit and obviously, the trait was never intended to be used like that, thus Anet slammed it shut with the nerf hammer!!!

boozer.7815:

Psst! We have a blast finisher in earth line that synergizes very well with everything we have. Its called Eruption. That is our bread and butter finisher along with Arcane Blast. They are what I have been using for a long time now and they work just fine. Staff is VERY viable in Wv3 and PvE without EA. It always has been. EA was an exploit and obviously, the trait was never intended to be used like that, thus Anet slammed it shut with the nerf hammer!!!

You may think we’re all morons, but in fact the Evasive Arcana fans are among the best players in the game. We know about Eruption. That’s why we comboed that with Lava Font, Arcane Wave and Lava Font for a triple might boost. EA wasn’t an exploit. It required more skill to use properly than just about anything else in this game, hence the risk vs. reward. It was a playstyle in itself, not the only staff build but certainly one of the most fun.

Even if it was a mistake, rather than using it to enrich their gameplay, ArenaNet removed it. It’s like how somebody invented the Snowboard, many people liked it and the the authorities ban it from the slope, instead of adding a park where people can stunt without it bothering other people.

It was a great skill, intended or not and they should have kept it in the game. It’s not about power, it’s about the fun that came with it.

The thing that was being exploited was the ability to double/tripple roll in water fields for 2-3x finishers without even changing elements. Of course a simple global cooldown could have fixed that…

ThiBash.5634:

boozer.7815:

Psst! We have a blast finisher in earth line that synergizes very well with everything we have. Its called Eruption. That is our bread and butter finisher along with Arcane Blast. They are what I have been using for a long time now and they work just fine. Staff is VERY viable in Wv3 and PvE without EA. It always has been. EA was an exploit and obviously, the trait was never intended to be used like that, thus Anet slammed it shut with the nerf hammer!!!

You may think we’re all morons, but in fact the Evasive Arcana fans are among the best players in the game. We know about Eruption. That’s why we comboed that with Lava Font, Arcane Wave and Lava Font for a triple might boost. EA wasn’t an exploit. It required more skill to use properly than just about anything else in this game, hence the risk vs. reward. It was a playstyle in itself, not the only staff build but certainly one of the most fun.

You can’t be serious that EA fans were among the best players in the game. Every scrub could take it who knew about its “unintended feature”. Plus, noone said that EA was exploit, but deemed too much powerful.

“Unintended feature”= exploit
But yeah, it was much too powerful for bunkers BUT that doesn’t mean the finishers should have been removed completely. We were all expected a nerf, but nothing this extreme.
As for skill he probably means outside of solo bunkers in spvp. For normal non bunker play, you had to do a lot of timing an positioning to ensure your party members benefited from the might stacks, or to heal a kiting ally (without making him stop).

Navzar.2938:

“Unintended feature”= exploit

Exactly right. The OP part of it was that this “unintended feature” gave us another blast finisher on the move, enabling us to stack up extra boons on yourself and others that Anet never intended for us to be able to do. Now, we just have one less blast finisher available to us. That is all.

It’s not just one less blast finisher dude, it was the majority of a staff’s blast finishers and a significant portion of d/d and s/d finishers too. And no, the OP part wasn’t the boons, it was the healing from water fields, the boons weren’t a problem.

haviz.1340:

You can’t be serious that EA fans were among the best players in the game. Every scrub could take it who knew about its “unintended feature”.

Using EA didn’t take skill. Using it consistently during dungeon bosses or PvP fights however, did.

At the very least, you may presume that players who are smart enough to both know how to dodge AND know how combo fields work, will know about our other combo options.

boozer.7815:

Navzar.2938:

“Unintended feature”= exploit

Exactly right. The OP part of it was that this “unintended feature” gave us another blast finisher on the move, enabling us to stack up extra boons on yourself and others that Anet never intended for us to be able to do. Now, we just have one less blast finisher available to us. That is all.

Actually, we now have 2 less blast finishers. They removed the finisher from Dragon’s Tooth too.

“Unintended feature”= exploit

You know how many great things were discovered by accident?

Like penicillin, champagne, post-its, cellophane, velcro, the whole American continent, dynamite (explosives are costantly used for building construction), teflon and countless of other great things which greatly help us today.

I am not saying Evasive Arcana is to be compared with so many great inventions, what I want to point out is some of the unintended features could actualy be good as in fun in a game.

No one will ever try to defend old EA from being overpowered, but it was so fun to play with it, it gave another layer of complexity to the Elementalist profession which now is totaly gone.

I know that the developer team might be overwhelmed by the amount of work needed to balance and fix this game and that they could have missed how fun EA was, but I hope they will acnowledge it now.

Elementalist players are not trying to get back an OP trait, I think most of us just want back a fun mechanic.

Way to ruin something nice, I really hope they bring back the blast finishers on dodge.

I don’t even think the prior behavior was especially overpowered (outside of sPvp). It was good and it was useful, but it required active play and cost endurance to use.

Grandmaster Major traits are supposed to be good and useful. The old behavior should have been the norm for GM Major traits rather than the one decent trait in a disappointing group.

Like Navzar said, the truly OP part was being able to lay down a water field and double/triple heal off of it via rolls alone. That was something that pretty much anyone will agree was over the top. Global cooldown on the blast finisher? Bam, no more rapid fire water blast heals. Blast finisher only on the “churning earth” roll? Bam, no more rapid fire water blast heals. And you still keep part of what made Evasive Arcana fun to play with. I’d run through CoE at least 70 times on my Warrior and Thief, and after I took my Elementalist in there, I decided that if possible I’d probably only ever take my Ele in there. Comboing with Evasive Arcana while timing dodges with Alpha and ensuring I manage to get into the correct fields in a hodpodge of fields was by far the most fun I’d had in CoE in all those runs, and maybe in my whole PvE experience.

Did you know combos were once unintended and a gimmick/easter egg in fighting games? Once they were discovered and started to be heavily utilized because of what you could do with them, maybe they should have scrapped any ability to do so. Instead, they were built upon once game developers saw how much people enjoyed them, and now they’re an essential and fun part of pretty much any fighter.

Rocket jumping was once a quirk used to reach an easter egg and was supposed to be paired with invulnerability. Now it’s a very common gameplay mechanic that’s used to add a lot of speed and skill to different games.

In the original Tribes, skiing was an exploitation of the game’s physics engine. The entirety of the community learned how to use it and play around with it because it greatly increased the speed and fun of the gameplay, and by the next installment it was an “official feature”.

If your community finds something fun to play with, and you leave in there knowingly for months and give them months to build around it, you don’t just say “YOINK SUCKAS” and just remove it completely. You find a way to compromise and build around it, and integrate into the game.

The way Anet dealt with this is so kitten backwards that I seriously don’t understand how they could have come to the conclusion that this was the best way to deal with it.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

If your community finds something fun to play with, and you leave in there knowingly for months and give them months to build around it, you don’t just say “YOINK SUCKAS” and just remove it completely. You find a way to compromise and build around it, and integrate into the game.

Even an explicit “YOINK SUCKAS” would be more communication than we’ve had in the last month.

ThiBash.5634:

haviz.1340:

You can’t be serious that EA fans were among the best players in the game. Every scrub could take it who knew about its “unintended feature”.

Using EA didn’t take skill. Using it consistently during dungeon bosses or PvP fights however, did.

At the very least, you may presume that players who are smart enough to both know how to dodge AND know how combo fields work, will know about our other combo options.

Most of players I’ve met that were utilizing EA weren’t exactly doing what you’ve just described. On the contrary, they were wasting endurance just to dodge into combo fields and then they were left with no energy to dodge. The truth is, average player don’t know how to dodge properly.

haviz.1340:

Combos relies on other proffesions, that’s their whole point.

Thieves, mesmers, engineers, guardians and necromancers all say hello. Each of those have the means of producing combos off of their own combo fields.

WhimsicalPacifist.2943:

haviz.1340:

Combos relies on other proffesions, that’s their whole point.

Thieves, mesmers, engineers, guardians and necromancers all say hello. Each of those have the means of producing combos off of their own combo fields.

Eles say hello as well!

All professions have means to self-combo, but combos are still meant for party group, and not all classes are equally good at self-comboing (for example, Rangers and Warriors are much better at finishing, while staff Elementalists at fields).

Also, many tooltip descriptions in this game are outdated and wrong. Updating them does not means that Anet is lazy. Armor of Earth, Churning Earth, Phoenix and Healing Rain are strong skills by themselves. Elementalists need their weakest skills to be stronger, not their strong skills to be op.

Evasive arcana definitely turned into a unique playstyle, but completely removing blast finishers was not the solution. When you make the requirement for the finisher the same as the actual spell effects, you get multiple drawbacks that an ele has to take into account before utilizing the finisher, while still giving him/her a very clear choice based on these drawbacks. The ele can sacrifice an attunement swap and endurance to get multiple finishers, or he can use only one, just sacrificing endurance. As it currently is, the only way you can get a blast finisher within the staff set off of multiple skills is by starting with eruption first; EA gave us different attunement cycling options for comboing with ourselves. We assumed this was a reward for unlocking the grandmaster level of Arcana, but apparently not.

I understand they only have two people working on these changes, but it honestly wouldn’t hurt them to actually check with the community for constructive feedback rather than treating these balancing changes as “spoilers.”

For the most part, I think “on dodge” trait effects should be completely reworked. They should reward successful evasion instead of just using up endurance, and have their successful evasion effects buffed.

Heimlich.3065:

kostbabis.8791:

pls bring it back

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Remember that they removed the blast finisher (completely) from Dragon’s Tooth too.

Now there are only 2 combo finishers (total) outside of Earth Attunement and utility slots (Comet and Phoenix are the remaining two).

If I was a betting man, I’d wager ANet will remove them (without comment, naturally) in an upcoming “fix”.

The blast finisher on Dragons Tooth is not removed, but now focuses on where the Tooth lands, not centered around the caster.

Otaur.9268:

Heimlich.3065:

kostbabis.8791:

pls bring it back

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Remember that they removed the blast finisher (completely) from Dragon’s Tooth too.

Now there are only 2 combo finishers (total) outside of Earth Attunement and utility slots (Comet and Phoenix are the remaining two).

If I was a betting man, I’d wager ANet will remove them (without comment, naturally) in an upcoming “fix”.

The blast finisher on Dragons Tooth is not removed, but now focuses on where the Tooth lands, not centered around the caster.

It doesn’t work at all.

Peters, the Elementalists deserve an explanation! Stop hiding under your bed and fess up!

as already reported many times… after the patch that was supposed to move the blast location form the caster to the impact zone the finischer effect has totally disappered… many player has tested and reported that no balst hapen nor on the caster nor on the impact location… it only stay in the tooltip…. at least for now… :/

Otaur.9268:

Heimlich.3065:

kostbabis.8791:

pls bring it back

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Remember that they removed the blast finisher (completely) from Dragon’s Tooth too.

Now there are only 2 combo finishers (total) outside of Earth Attunement and utility slots (Comet and Phoenix are the remaining two).

If I was a betting man, I’d wager ANet will remove them (without comment, naturally) in an upcoming “fix”.

The blast finisher on Dragons Tooth is not removed, but now focuses on where the Tooth lands, not centered around the caster.

Test it yourself (I did, it takes 20 seconds to do). Despite what the patch notes say, it does not cause any type of finisher at either location.

Similarly, Cantrip Mastery does not work on Mist Form (despite patch notes claiming that it does work).

It doesn’t seem like anybody actually tested these changes, and that’s shameful.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

Did you know combos were once unintended and a gimmick/easter egg in fighting games? Once they were discovered and started to be heavily utilized because of what you could do with them, maybe they should have scrapped any ability to do so. Instead, they were built upon once game developers saw how much people enjoyed them, and now they’re an essential and fun part of pretty much any fighter.

Since you mentioned combos, animation cancelling was originally an unintentional “exploit” that became one of the defining game mechanics found in practically all fighting games afterwards. Combos wouldn’t be nearly as complex without them. It isn’t exclusive to fighting games either, but also MOBA and strategy games like DoTA (orbwalking). This unintentional game mechanic opened up windows for more complex gameplay.

That’s how I see EA. Sure, they need to tone down the repeat blast finishers with a CD, but total removal of the mechanic is overdoing it and a waste IMO.

If a dev is reading this I would like to say, GJ bro I can tell it took you guys a long time to think of this solution. Thanks for leaving us with such a grandmaster trait, but here’s a suggestion for the next update, instead of having EA deal pity damage it should be a self-destruct instead. Think of it this way, how awesome would it be to dodge and then blow up into pieces, I can’t think of a better GM trait than that

FYI: Video of the Dragon’s Tooth not having finisher.

Klassic.8057:

If a dev is reading this I would like to say, GJ bro I can tell it took you guys a long time to think of this solution. Thanks for leaving us with such a grandmaster trait, but here’s a suggestion for the next update, instead of having EA deal pity damage it should be a self-destruct instead. Think of it this way, how awesome would it be to dodge and then blow up into pieces, I can’t think of a better GM trait than that

I can think of one, it would involve us being stuck in Tornado for 3min, even spawning in Tornado, I think that might be a bit too OP though.

I would love to see the devs reply about their stance for evasive arcana/elementalist in general. It would be much easier for me to make decision to reroll other prof or not.

I’d be ok with the removal of all blast finishers if the damage of rolls in fire and earth were brought into line with their skill descriptions. As it is, the water roll, and very situationally the air roll are the only ones with any use at all now.

The worst bit of this is that ArenaNet apparently can’t even sum up the decency to make a half baked explanation for something that’s really quite a big problem.

No wait, that’s the second worst thing. The worst thing was when the mod infracted people who asked him/her if they’d reported the EA issue to the developer, in response to the same moderator stating that they report issues that are of great concern to the player community. Apparently, that was somehow ‘off-topic’.

With every thing else wrong with the elementalist at the moment, was a (nerf)/fix the right way to go?

I’d rather see the ele get some love first, then get to the (nerf)balancing.

Simply making a statement – Anet lost a customer, mainly due to this (though they do get credit for issuing a requested refund without hassle). If I ever see a lot of class fixes that make sense, fun class improvements, open discussion when requested, and honesty about what they intend to do with vertical progression, I might start again. Good luck, fellow eles.

I’v been thinking about these nerfs for awhile and after seeing daphoenix’s WvW videos I saw it. Even though he is incredibly skilled, the level of advantage that he got was to high for his skill, if that makes any sense. He said himself that he could deal with over 5 players, even coordinated ones. Let’s say that Anet didn’t have the intention that a class should be able to handle that many other players on any class no matter the skill level of the user.

Maybe? Just my thoughts.

There must be some dev answer to all those bugs. They are not fixing anything rather they make it worse….

WvW cannot be taken seriously for balancing…

In WvW you meet lvl 1 people in white gear….any difference in equip is making a huge difference even some coordinated group have subpar equipment sometime.