Guild Wars 2

I don’t understand how updates are made as a preference of what players want to see as a counter rather than what is best for the class.

What good is Blasting Staff if I can only hit five targets, and over a greater area? Each target = Random Number Generator if more than 5 exist on the inside…So blasting staff makes my attacks more inaccurate on who I want to hit.

So, back then an Ele could have infinite targeting.

Nevermind the idea that I have to stand still for four seconds against a zerg. A zerg sees the ring…and can move out of the way. Nevermind the fact smart players can interrupt me while I am doing that or knock me down, not to mention I can only kill on a glass cannon to mid-damage build…and if I fail I am kitty litter!

Nevermind the idea a healing rain due to how bad targetting is now even on five players can outheal meteor showers on vitality builds…

I guess as much as I love elementalists, I actually hate how bad they are treated. I know, im one of the millions “Pick a number and await your turn”

Originally the idea was to give players freedom to play. It shouldn’t be the freedom to suffer and suck. Elementalist already has to push heavily in one central direction to do anything thematic and that gets split apart by the fact that when enough players complain….

…..rather than balance the game, in order to make more money seeing as no one wants to lose many players over it, they simply nerf the class in demand to what people want rather than actually balance the game.

The exception are the mesmer portals, culling effects, portal bombing that exists everywhere.

The idea behind an Elementalist was to have that kind of damage at the risk of getting killed from failure. However, my fear is that I believe that the nerfing came from the fact that it was Glass Cannon Builds at level 80 + Exotics that were dealing tons of damage…

So now, any player who has any class that deals with a nerf while trying to level to 80 suffers from the nerf….since its taken from the view of a max-stat, one-way, fully-geared player….along with my feeling of a public relations to prevent people from leaving by minimizing the level of thinking or strategy needed in a game.

What I feel is that some traits have been made worse due to target limit and its hard to heal groups now with everything reduced to five. I always keep healing NPCs…Seems like they get priority.

Now…Im not that flimsy as an Elementalist. I have all my skills unlocked. I love playing the different areas of GW2…and there is still a lot of heart in GW2…Specially with several armor sets exotic done (Im up to 4) and 2 – 3 weapon sets which I carry with me.. Around 500 – 600+ hours as an Elementalist going through the skills.

I love the Conjured Weapons and made a build that has them work…

I just wonder how each time a class is balanced, how something else is not broken.

Every other MMO that I play out there gives me more than five targets on a spell. If not more than five targets…At least increase the damage over a reduced number of targets to counterbalance things.

Sure, I cant hit 20 – 30 players…but at least damaging 5 players (or healing 5) should be a little more.

So we have Thief, Elementalist and Guardian as the three base 10,805 Health classes. but of the three classes and potential, Elementalist actually have the least the can do….

Since we have been nerfed to 5 targets, can we get at least a second weapon set? Thief and Guardian get it and we can’t switch weapons out unless its done manually…

This is why ELEs were powerful to begin with..

Now that we dont have that level of power…can we actually get a second weapon set and damage to reflect it?

I mean as it stands right now, Guild Wars 1 Elementalists are stronger and more favorable than Guild Wars 2 Eles. …and I love both games.

Blasting Staff is a very useful trait because it increases the radius of Lava Font, Eruption, Geyser, Healing Rain, Static Field, Frozen Ground, and Ice Spike, making them vastly more likely to actually hit multiple targets (Why would you ever want to hit one guy and not hit all his buddies?). It also vastly improves staff’s 1v1 performance as it’s easier to get enemies to walk over a big lava font than a small lava font. And is the only thing that makes running staff in spvp bearable as a node assaulter/defender (Erupt is the EXACT size of the node the enemy has to stand on to cap it). Frankly I can’t imagine how you can manage running a staff build WITHOUT this trait. True it dilutes our Meteor Shower so it does less concentrated damage, but it spreads it out so more enemies are likely to get hit by meteors.

Though I do agree with the basis of your post. I dislike the idea of a 5 target cap on AoEs. Both damage and support. Almost all high difficulty content in GW2 is limited to five man groups anyway, so this only effects live world and WvWvW content.

I can see it as an issue as far as support. An ele aura sharing build for example would be insanely powerful in large zergs, but at the same time having more than one aura sharing ele would just be redundant as the benefits from the auras don’t stack as far as I’m aware. And the boons stack in duration, so at most it’d give the zerg perma swiftness and fury. Which is admittedly pretty powerful, but most zergs have swiftness up as a whole 80-90% of the time on average from my experience. And this game generally has damage > healing potential, so I doubt we’d see unkillable zergs fighting unkillable zergs. And it’d make support builds feel a little more welcome in WvWvW, as right now high damage builds seem to rule the roosts.

And honestly if a million people decide to bunch up and sit on my lava font, they all deserve to take the damage.

Ehecatl.9172:

And honestly if a million people decide to bunch up and sit on my lava font, they all deserve to take the damage.

That in itself should be reason enough to make AoE’s hit everything. Let positioning mean something for catsoutloud!

If only we could have “upgraded” version of skills (PvE only), or some elite charge like pulling all meteor balls to the same spot! /wake-up

The boon limit of 5 players on most buff skills I can see. Mulitple players throwing around group boons to a 20-player group could get really crazy really fast.

I really don’t understand the 5-enemy limit on damaging AoE skills, though. This is just about the only game I’ve ever played that arbitrarily limits the number of enemies you can hit, and I really don’t see why that limit needs to be there. If you can physically hit 6+ enemies at once, why disallow that? Its not as though the AoE’s in this game are so large that you can regularly hit 10 enemies at once so that AoE’s will just always be insanely powerful and need to be limited, the situations where that can happen are uncommon and almost entirely limited to DE’s where large groups of enemies pour in from a single point.

Unless its simply to try and make it easier for people without large AoEs to hit enemies before they just get nuked by a bunch of AoE damage from other players. Which I can kind of see, but at the same time it seems a big limit on AoEs and there has to be a better way to handle that issue.

They have the AoE player target limit is to prevent groups of, for example, 5-6 elementalists completely erasing an area, like when defending gates or in a zerg fight. Since pretty much every class in this game has some form of AoE, fights would be really short and brutal, and pretty much reduced to who got their abilities off first.

So they have an artificial limit to prevent AoE focus firing. Ask any player of EvE Online what a skilled bomber group can do to a fleet, this would be pretty much the same, except the bombers wouldn’t be so easy to kill.

Gaudrath.6725:

They have the AoE player target limit is to prevent groups of, for example, 5-6 elementalists completely erasing an area, like when defending gates or in a zerg fight. Since pretty much every class in this game has some form of AoE, fights would be really short and brutal, and pretty much reduced to who got their abilities off first.

So they have an artificial limit to prevent AoE focus firing. Ask any player of EvE Online what a skilled bomber group can do to a fleet, this would be pretty much the same, except the bombers wouldn’t be so easy to kill.

Yet glass cannon elementalists are the easiest class to kill, our AoEs are stationary with big red circles on the ground, or their damage is over time where you can just walk on top of them for a second to cross and barely get hurt or they are very random by nature with big cooldowns.

I’m assuming that in fleets positioning matters a great deal so you all don’t get wiped by a couple bombers… why can’t I, as an elementalist punish a bunch of dumb f…..s who stand together in the same spot without moving? It dumbs down the game.

Gaudrath.6725:

Ask any player of EvE Online what a skilled bomber group can do to a fleet, this would be pretty much the same, except the bombers wouldn’t be so easy to kill.

The difference is bombers have a stealth, sig radius and mobility advantage. They are what I imagine the dirty offspring of a thief and elementalist would be.

Eve also doesn’t have pretty red rings telling you to obviously move out of them, and no, seeing yourself being locked up and primaried on your overview doesn’t count as pretty red rings but instills that sense of imminent death that people standing in AOE in this game should.

NdranC.5107:

I’m assuming that in fleets positioning matters a great deal so you all don’t get wiped by a couple bombers… why can’t I, as an elementalist punish a bunch of dumb f…..s who stand together in the same spot without moving? It dumbs down the game.

Because this game forces people to bunch up in certain scenarios. Like the aforementioned gates. Already you can rain pain on gate attackers, now I doubt that a gate assault would be even remotely possible if there was a dedicated elementalist group (or any caster with ranged AoE damage) focus-firing around. You could insta-murder whole zergs by having a roaming group of AoE attackers on vent (so they can sync up nicely) just plow into them.

Maybe if there was a way to shield whole areas from such attacks, so you could have counter teams, but unfortunately this game isn’t so complex.

Also, as awesome as the rest of the game may be, EvE fleet PVP isn’t really about the, you know, the fun PvP part. Mostly it is just about listening to your commander on vent and clicking through primary and secondary targets on a big spreadsheet style list. Not so sure that would work well in this game. And in EvE you don’t have theme-park style classes, so that doesn’t translate well, since that game literally has thousands and thousand of ship configurations, fleet configurations, maneuvers, tactics etc. etc.

GW2 is about big swords and magic, and just a handful of specific classes each offering only a few possible distinct variations. So with such a limited variety you have to have a similarly limited combat system in order to keep it playable for the majority of players.