Guild Wars 2

Highest skill ceiling.

In a game based around the most skilled player winning having a class with a significantly higher skill ceiling means that less skilled players will frequently beat more skilled players simply because their class is easier to play.

This goes for PvE too. Why take an ele when he’ll need to be twice as good as the nearest ranger to be as effective?

This is really the main issue.
You can debate about whether they’re specifically underpowered in certain areas. But at the end of the day, it’s just a more complicated class which means its outmatched by everything else.

Yes. The elementalist got a steeper learning curve, but still I dont see this as the main issue of the class.

The fact that the class is based around 4 attunements seems to have screwed Anet over with traits synergi (some of the same issues we see with the Engineer class). This is leaving the elementalist somewhat behind in most aspects of the game. We are a little good to do all, but do not excel in any particular area.

Some people strive to expert this class and some people do. The elementalist have its place in both PvE and PvP atm, but the class needs to be looked over to make it more complete.

I was fine with my Ele until I came to the forums and found people complaining about how weak it is compared to other classes. So I tried out the other classes and found that they were easier to play. I could literally just walk into the middle of a group and start spamming skills at random and everything would be dead. At first, I thought, wow they are right. But after a while I started getting extremely bored with this gameplay and went back to my Ele.

Nothing feels cooler than knowing that you have the worst survivability out of any class, but you still charge into the middle of a huge group, hitting just the right sequence of skills and attunements, expertly dodging the heavy attacks and walking away with a just a sliver of health left. If you can play this class, you can play any class.

This is not a problem at all. As you’ve stated, Elementalist has a high skill ceiling. So when people roll into the mists with their level 2 Elementalists and complain that they can’t spam “2” to win, they cry “make elementalist faceroll!”. I’m not saying ele doesn’t need some tweaks, but people are throwing this out of proportion. Ele is supposed to be one of the hardest classes to play, and people are going into the class expecting faceroll.

Turbo Whale.1738:

Ele is supposed to be one of the hardest classes to play, and people are going into the class expecting faceroll.

Where did you get this information?
I would really like to know.

The difficulty of playing this class is why it’s my favorite. I just ignore the whiners and keep on keeping on. Elementalists need a little love from Anet, yes. But people go on like the class is fundamentally broken and it’s not. Damage mitigation needs to be looked at and our overall damage output I think needs a very modest bump, but this is not a broken class.

“Where did you get this information?
I would really like to know.”

Are you telling me that people roll ele into the mists, practice for 4 weeks, then give their valid input? NO.

Anet designed ele to be one of the hardest classes to play, and the hardest to master.

“Are you telling me that people roll ele into the mists, practice for 4 weeks, then give their valid input? NO.
Anet designed ele to be one of the hardest classes to play, and the hardest to master.”

People don’t roll ele into mists at all because they know it’s UP – you only need to take a small stroll into the sPvP forum to see other classes laughing it up.

Before our nerf, in the BWE’s you did see people rolling into the mists with an ele.
It wasn’t exactly facerolling back then, but life was MUCH, much easier. Right now, we’re just broken compared to then

Anet isn’t stupid – they wouldn’t design a whole class that only small minority of people would be able to play effectively – specially when the demographic this MMO is going for is “the general public” with its ease and streamlining of most features.

Hard to master? I’d say they all should be. Until then, it’s unbalanced.

If I remember correctly, ANet said they planned the classes to have differing learning curves and mastery ceilings. I believe the Warrior was supposed to be the easiest to learn yet the hardest to master, while the Elementalist would be difficult to learn but average difficulty to master. I am going off my memory here, so I am afraid I cannot cite or provide the correct quote.

Elric of Grans.7684:

If I remember correctly, ANet said they planned the classes to have differing learning curves and mastery ceilings. I believe the Warrior was supposed to be the easiest to learn yet the hardest to master, while the Elementalist would be difficult to learn but average difficulty to master. I am going off my memory here, so I am afraid I cannot cite or provide the correct quote.

This is ultimately the reason why people will go back to what ever game they were playing before imo. Anet utterly failed at balancing the leveling experience. Depending on what class you choose it goes from faceroll easy to difficult/overly complex. Thats just bad design and the reason why so many are upset. All classes should be created equal. IF they want a class or too to be a little bit more complex thats fine but they went overboard imo.

Thats just bad design

No. Bad design would be not providing different levels of options for different players. If you don’t like the hard thing, play an easy thing, don’t mess it up for everyone else (though honestly the skill ceiling bit is really exaggerated anyways, and if you really can’t handle it, you can just go scepter or staff and button mash and do decently with an Ele, so it’s not that big of a deal)

You know what, Zeropride, you’re right. All classes should be created equal.

This is why I propose all classes are to be made as complex as Elementalist. Would you agree to that?

Oh, wait, you want all classes to be just as easy/hard as YOU are capable of playing? Oh, now it all makes sense to me.

But more seriously, great design is allowing each player to play the game with the difficulty level he feels comfortable with. Just because everyone wants to play the hardest difficulty and aren’t able to, how is that either ANet’s problem, or my problem (which it will become if they change the class)?