Guild Wars 2

The Weaver is HIGH RISK, HIGH REWARD.

The original theme and flavor of the elementalist was for high risk, high reward. High risk, high reward gameplay is also high skill gameplay. We need our specializations and builds to have inherent risk in order to promote skill. This was lost in Heart of Thorns. In HoT, we were given too much damage and defense without really any drawbacks. Low risk, High reward. This is how we ended up with facerolling builds with such low skill floors. You know what builds I’m talking about.

I know that some people are worried about access to defensive 4 and 5 skills. That is not a design flaw, it is not an oversight, it is part of the tradeoff of choosing to play weaver. That is what it means to have high risk, high reward. For weaver, you give up near instant access to any given 4/5 skill of any given attunement in order to gain more skills and skill combinations. It defeats the purpose of the weaver if people keep trying to add various skills, buttons or mechanics to completely attune to an element without any sort of drawback. So, please stop.

If you are really worried about getting access to defensive 6/5 skills, there are a variety of ways to work around this. First off there is the utility skill ‘Unravel’ which allows you to fully attune to any attunement within five seconds. If you choose focus for your offhand, then you have a couple of big defensive skills on two attunements, air and earth. Unravel has 2 charges with a charge renewal of about 25 seconds. If you can’t use your defensive skills with Unravel, then you have bigger problems. If you don’t like the idea of putting your Unravel on your utility bar, then that is simply part of the tradeoff. You can also use Mistform. Mistform makes you invulnerable and you can also swap attunements while in mistform. Not to mention mistform being extremely powerful by itself. Also, there are several defensive skills included in the set of Dual Attacks.

If after all of this you still feel that it is too risky, I have a very simple solution for you. DON’T PLAY WEAVER.

P.S. Sorry if I seem a little salty. I am really excited for the Weaver specialization, but it seems that everyone keeps trying to compare the weaver to past gameplay. The weaver specialization will require a different kind of play style, something that I look forward to, but a lot of people don’t seem to want to let go of the past play style. I think that the weaver will bring back some of the original style and flavor of the elementalist, that is of fast attunement swapping and quick tempo. The tempest slowed down the Elementalist gameplay a lot.

The tempo and attunement-swapping probably won’t be as fast-paced as core ele with arcane, outside of weave-self (which has a pretty decent uptime though). However, weaver looks to involve a LOT more decision-making since there are so many options with consequences available at any point in time. I hope this will make for some engaging gameplay that at least makes you think fast. Also, there really isn’t THAT much defensive utility to find among the dual attacks. All attacks obviously give a small amount of barrier. Scepter gets an evading attack (which is nice) as do dagger. Most weapons get at least one attack that chills, and then dagger gets a blinding attack and a heal cooked into the evade, together with an aoe daze attack. Sword gets additional barrier on Lava Skin and an attack that causes float (looks promising). I’m unsure if staff gets anything of defensive value, as pile driver daze and pressure blast heal both have significant cast-times. It doesn’t look like you can outrun monsoon, which makes the healing numbers seem very low, but that has yet to be tested in practice. Lastly you get an aoe cripple which doesn’t seem half-bad. Scepter, dagger and staff all have one dual skill yet to be revealed, so there’s that.

there is nothing wrong with high risk, high reward playstyle however what worries me is the another possibility of next elite specs having lower risks with similar or higher rewards? Do u know what is high risk, ‘’high reward’’? Current Fresh Air ele.

You build yourself to be ’’tanky’’ against power damage and condi bombs become a problem and vice versa.

U wanna be actually sustainable enough to not get two shotted by thiefs of equal level? u go auramancer and your dps takes a massive dip.

Look at the warrior gs mace burst. it runs friggin berserker amulet and still has enough sustain to defend against power and condi damage without having to give up one defence for the other.

DH is the same, Scrapper is a bruiser, Druid a nice allarounder as well in pvp.

Necro and Rev kinda have trade offs. but necro shines in a co-ordinated teams. Rev can still deal decent amount of damage, rotate around the map and actually do well in 1 v 1’s. and it’s still more sustainable then fresh air ele.

honestly high risk reward is currently high risk equal to reward

Exactly. The fact that in HoT we got an elite specialization with warrior that could run Berserker amulet and still be able to face tank both direct and condition damage says something about the risk/reward balance of the HoT specializations. It’s also considered meta enough that most people can pick it up without too much problem. Because the risk/reward is out of whack is also how we get condi daredevil cheese. Low risk, high reward.

I just want this expansion to have a suitable balance of risk to reward. I think that weaver currently has a good risk to reward balance. At least it seems that way from just looking at the design. We will see when we get to actually play it. I was just disappointed that after the announcement, the forum was filled with several things about how to “fix” the weaver. As it is now the weaver will require some serious critical thinking in analyzing and anticipating an opponents moves. Which I think will make the gameplay much more interesting. This didn’t really happen for a lot of specializations in HoT. The HoT specializations didn’t require as high of a level of critical thinking in order to play well.

It does seem like PoF specs have high risk compared to HoT specs (minus guard and mes). Fewer evades, blocks, less mobility in general.

I do have concerns about weaver though as it might end up d/d on steroids.

Jakal.9582:

Exactly. The fact that in HoT we got an elite specialization with warrior that could run Berserker amulet and still be able to face tank both direct and condition damage says something about the risk/reward balance of the HoT specializations. It’s also considered meta enough that most people can pick it up without too much problem. Because the risk/reward is out of whack is also how we get condi daredevil cheese. Low risk, high reward.

I just want this expansion to have a suitable balance of risk to reward. I think that weaver currently has a good risk to reward balance. At least it seems that way from just looking at the design. We will see when we get to actually play it. I was just disappointed that after the announcement, the forum was filled with several things about how to “fix” the weaver. As it is now the weaver will require some serious critical thinking in analyzing and anticipating an opponents moves. Which I think will make the gameplay much more interesting. This didn’t really happen for a lot of specializations in HoT. The HoT specializations didn’t require as high of a level of critical thinking in order to play well.

Looking at mirage and holosmith. I honestly have a feeling that we will again have classes with lower risk and equal or higher rewards to weaver. heck even if we give a-net the benefit of the doubt and have the new elite specs equal to current elite specs we will eventually end up the same problem maby only moved on different classes. I honestly believe that Weaver doesn’t need ’’fixing’’ were there the risk to reward ratio fair aka lower risk lower reward. Honestly I’d rather have it buff weaver cause i’d be kitten ed to kittening hear: Fresh air isn’t viable yadda yadda yadda. I honestly have a feeling that in general elite specs will create a similar meta in wich a ‘’burst class’’ also has enough sustain of a pre hot bunker class. because lets be real here. every ’’burst’’ build and anything inbetween are all just all arounders with varying degrees sustain and dps. when sustain>dps it is a bruiser or bunker. I’d rather have a more powerfull dps role then to realize weaver might be put in the same boat as fresh air ele, and then wait maby another 2 years or gw3 for an spellcaster class that finnally works.

personally i dislike that they went the way of “even more weapon swapping, more complexity, on top of already silly amount of complexity and Zero fixes to the lack of power gain by doing so”.
every other class perform far better at far less involvement, which i see as a major issue.
it just doesn’t feel very rewarding and the fact Aoe’s (especially staff here) are so ridiculessly easy to avoid and even when hit their damage is very low compared to Any other skill combo which takes a 3-6seconds to land the full damage on and multiple roots+the exspending of all cleanse before you can lay down the combo’s.

i had hoped for some much needed ranged love to the ele, to give it that “Mage” feel which it should have been as an “elementalist”…
so many melee focused classes why kitten the ele so much on this area :/

Is high risk just referring to being kittening instagibbed by thieves for another expansion? If so leave me at the front door.

I actually like the added complexity. If something doesn’t work out the way I was planning, it kind of spurs me to work towards getting better. If I land a great combo, or reaction, I feel pretty cool. I like having playing a class that is a little bit more difficult. That is my personal opinion.

As far as thieves go. When has there been a time when you didn’t need to work around and anticipate other classes and players? Even if I am killed immediately, I just feel that I need to get better. Either in proper use of skills, or in anticipation and prediction.

It’s not high risk, high reward. It call your core ele with an extra dodge perk to generate an hp shield. So it’s Flashy but medium risk and low reward.

It’s just a core staff ele, core d/d or fresh air scepter ele with some new flare. You don’t have more conditions that do damage like torment in earth or perplexity when daze under air attunement. It’s really core a rotations with the same damage if you were to pve. It is acutally weaker than tempest if it had been nerf so many times the last year pve wise. In spvp it wont make that much difference limited stats in pvp will get it killed. In wvw you have much more wiggle room, however increased cc, boon corruption or heavy consistent condi burst will still kill it also.

But it’s pretty and at least a step in the right direction.

I hate to point this out, but Anet stopped caring about “high risk high reward” in the beta already.

Just look at condi daredevil atm. Whats the risk there to promote skilled gameplay? Or Warrior in the past?

Tbh, what Ive seen so far of Weaver I really dont like. It forces elementalist even more into a rigid skill-rotation, which is NOT skilled gameplay.

Overall, Weaver just looks horribly unflexible. I really hope Anet offers a REALLY skilled method to switch attunements faster or even to switch into offhand attunement directly.

But after Anet removed Kinetic Battery for engineer, Im not hopeful at all. My prediction atm is rather that Weaver/Tempest/Elementalist goes the way of the Necro (or elementalist in gw1) – might be good if not for all the little flaws that make it just 3rd place in everything.