Guild Wars 2

Arenanet, I think you have some serious game imbalances in spvp. As a d/d Elementalist with a decently high amount of toughness/vitality, and a 0/20/0/20/30 build it is almost impossible to deal with any competent thief, warrior, or mesmer.

I do not understand why you nerfed whirlpool, because that was the only way for Elementalist to be viable in Capricorn…

I also do not understand why ride the lightning, and burning speed seem to not function over half the time.

Why doesn’t Elementalist have a weapon swap? Even if it had a 1 minute cooldown in combat, it would be better than being unable to deal with half of the classes due to the lack of long or short range spells.

Just out of curiosity when are you going to make Eementalist viable in spvp as dps, I really don’t think that I should be restricted to only being able to be staff heal/tank.

I have no comment.. i can only look, try to think of something to say to troll him, but then by the same token, kinda agree with a lot of what he says.

playing the elementalist is like playing as DAN in street fighter, when everyone else is playing AKUMA and RYU.

On top of this I don’t get why we have horrible base health and base armor, we basically are set up to fail in the current spvp environment. We can’t gear to make up all of these deficits and still do decent damage.

I love PvP and wanted it to be the endgame for my ele but it is horribly frustrating and i always feel weak and pitiful compared to other classes, not the experience i’m looking for from a game. I’m currently leveling a warrior instead so that i can enjoy WvWvW. What a shame, hopefully the elementalist will be fixed (there are about a hundred bugs in the profession that might make the difference) but until then i’d advise against PvPing with one.

I’ve had no problem with 0/0/30/30/10

Also, Akuma and RYU are only the plate classes

Everyone else is Dan

I’m seeing the pattern that people have fun in PvE with their elementalist but in PvP they are having no fun. In my mind this is largely due to the fact that many of the elementalists more powerful abilities are simply not effective against player characters such as dragon’s tooth, meteor shower, flame wall, churning earth, etc. So players wanting to spec as a glass-cannon end up being all glass and no cannon when player’s dance around all of their best attacks. This only leaves the turtle healer build which most elementalists did not envision when they rolled their tunes.

Also Akuma is ugly.

Well if you read the class description, it promises all the damage in the world..and i will fully admit that the first time i played the Ele in PVE i was having a blast…but now 100ish spvp and 90 tpvp games into the class….i just hop on one of my other 5 classes and run one of them.

Not saying i still dont try once every couple of days thinking i’m just doing it wrong

PvP is kinda fubar’d right now with most people playing gimmicky-ezmode-facerolling classes/builds. That’s not to say you can’t jump in and be a little terror though. If you want to get a real feel for where you stand in PvP I’d suggest trying the free tournaments. They’re virtually the complete opposite of the Hotjoins.

I’ve been using this build http://tinyurl.com/bq8nuwj for a more dmg focused build though it provides ample staying power. I’ve found that it’s far better for PvP than S/D while offering all of the same positives and more responsive than a Staff build.

If it’s not enough raw power, you can push more aggressively by swapping Earth Armor for Signet of Earth for an extra immobilize (swap the Water III trait for the Water II in this case) as well as swapping the Earth Runes for Rune of the Fire (also has aura proc). Also swap Sigil of Energy (50% endurance on swap) for Sigil of Battle (3 stacks of might on swap). You’ll lose some of that staying power though.

I’ve been playing around with all kinds of PvP builds for Ele’s and found this to be the most complete allowing me to do real dmg and provide real pressure without getting blown up everytime someone looks at me.

anet is just terrible to balance and ignoring their community completely, every one have been riding this complaint since beta and they still havent even tried to address it -_-

It took anet over a year to fully fix elementalists’ problems in GW1 and then they nerfed them again shortly thereafter only finally fixing them another year later. But that was to completely bring them on par with everybody else. I suspect it will probably take at least three months before they start patching them to a place where they will be a reasonable choice for any form of PvP.

This is all assuming that they will move at the same speed in GW2 as they did in GW1. The up side is that everybody playing an ele in PvP now will be god like once they are actually brought up to snuff.

BishopX.6453:

I have no comment.. i can only look, try to think of something to say to troll him, but then by the same token, kinda agree with a lot of what he says.

playing the elementalist is like playing as DAN in street fighter, when everyone else is playing AKUMA and RYU.

Activate Elite (ultra) do a taunt, HELL YEA!!

Erebus.7568:

anet is just terrible to balance and ignoring their community completely, every one have been riding this complaint since beta and they still havent even tried to address it -_-

You clearly haven’t played MMO’s by other companies.

WoW was famous for catering specific classes and ignoring others for ENTIRE EXPANSIONS. Not to mention they had pride issues when it came to mechanics. If they introduced a new mechanic to fix a problem, and it didn’t work.. they would scrap the entire mechanic and replace it with a worthless one, rather than balance out the mechanic. Why? likely because they were too prideful to admit they made a mistake and had a rule about balancing only through experimentation.

This games only been out for a short period of time and we get bug patches every week, which is already outstanding for an MMO. if you hadn’t noticed.. 90% of the classes are broken and imbalanced to various degrees so it’s going to take long to fix things.

adding to the quality of the mmo and updates we’re getting
its pretty amazing that this has no subscription fee..

Zonzai.2341:

This is all assuming that they will move at the same speed in GW2 as they did in GW1. The up side is that everybody playing an ele in PvP now will be god like once they are actually brought up to snuff.

You can be Godlike now. Roll a Mesmer in sPVP

They claim they don’t want to over tune and have to nerf later, but that sounds stupid when talking about a class with broken traits, quite a few broken abilities (aoe regen in staff water. Unless they’re using a new system of time, 2.5 seconds isn’t the same as 9), and a poorly thought out class mechanic, on top of that a class they keep nerfing as well. The afraid to make too strong argument dies fast.
Kind of like the dev post about how they won’t buff necro because supposedly death shroud is such a powerful mechanic it would make them god mode lol.

I hate how all our speed traits fail or don’t even work. Ride the Lightning, and overall base damage. I know that we can be tough, but unless we all start cloning Daphoenix’s build which ANet says they are watching… It would just get boring. I like choices. My ele is full condition spec, and a mesmer without speccing / gearing this way out Condition damaged me. Its really sad.

On the other hand, I cannot wait to see the update to Ele when they patch on the 22nd! Hopefully some nice changes.

I think the problem with the Elementalist is that it was the first character revealed, so it did not get as much attention as future classes? Maybe?

Chronocook.8937:

I love PvP and wanted it to be the endgame for my ele but it is horribly frustrating and i always feel weak and pitiful compared to other classes, not the experience i’m looking for from a game. I’m currently leveling a warrior instead so that i can enjoy WvWvW. What a shame, hopefully the elementalist will be fixed (there are about a hundred bugs in the profession that might make the difference) but until then i’d advise against PvPing with one.

Rolling a warrior for WvWvW….What is wrong with you? While elementalists may fail at sPvP, they were literally built to be monsters in WvW. You have AoE literally coming out of the kitten which will shred through zergs like nobody’s business. This is extra useful considering most people don’t move out of AoE circles while defending/attacking a keep so you can get tons of kills. Furthermore, an elementalist is the most mobile class by far with a d/d build. So if you want, you can roam around and pick off people then flee like nobody’s business when things get too dangerous. The large open spaces mean no one can catch you unless you want to be caught.

Warrior, on the other hand, has no real long range AoE attacks. The only thing he gets is longbow (which is vastly inferior to an elementalist’s AoE ability) so they’re already losing when we’re talking about zergs, and a warrior’s ability to escape is nothing compared to an elementalist. If things go south on a warrior, expect death, not escape.

Warriors do win in sPvP though…so you got that for you at least.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and your AoE circles kill siege equipment faster than anything else in the game.

Wintersun.2608:

Arenanet, I think you have some serious game imbalances in spvp. As a d/d Elementalist with a decently high amount of toughness/vitality, and a 0/20/0/20/30 build it is almost impossible to deal with any competent thief, warrior, or mesmer.

I do not understand why you nerfed whirlpool, because that was the only way for Elementalist to be viable in Capricorn…

I also do not understand why ride the lightning, and burning speed seem to not function over half the time.

Why doesn’t Elementalist have a weapon swap? Even if it had a 1 minute cooldown in combat, it would be better than being unable to deal with half of the classes due to the lack of long or short range spells.

Just out of curiosity when are you going to make Eementalist viable in spvp as dps, I really don’t think that I should be restricted to only being able to be staff heal/tank.

Ele’s do get weapon swap via attunement switching. Those of you who think Ele’s suck at sPvP are built wrong and played wrong. Those of you who think Ele’s suck at Wv3 have very serious LTP issues.

@Wintersun

What your issue with burning speed? Other than the fact that sometimes it’s finisher sometimes procs at the start it works completely fine.

As Boozer has pointed out, and it’s been said plenty of times before, swapping Attunements counts as a weapon swap. The only thing we’re asking for is an out of combat weapon swap.

sPvP is a different beast in itself. No matter how good your Ele build/gameplay is, against a coordinated team, you’re gonna get steam rolled. You can only engage one for so long before the rest of the team comes in as back up and then you’re forced to run. Or Vice Versa. tPvP is really where it’s at.

As far as Wv3 goes, yea. If you say we suck, you’re obviously having some type of issue with your build or gameplay. I constantly switch from Staff to D/D depending on how the battle is. I’ve assaulted gates as a D/D and have actually dropped a few people behind them. I’ve only hit up Wv3 3 times with around 6 hours total. Once in my 30’s and twice after I hit 80 and grabbed my Exotic set. Racked up 88 kills.

For most of us, the class is fine and we all know where the big issues are. Terrible or absolutely worthless traits, mainly minors, numerous skill bugs and RTL. Once RTL get’s a tracking fix or the ability to end the skill prematurely (probably the latter as we all saw how Lightning Whip was fixed) we’ll receive a huge boost. Even better if RTL actually tracked to the target correctly.

If you can’t adjust your gameplay to accommodate these current issues, stick to PvE or roll another class. I for one, am currently satisfied with my Elementalist even with the current problems.

Edit: @Wintersun not Boozer. Mistype

473623

Rolling a warrior for WvWvW….What is wrong with you? While elementalists may fail at sPvP, they were literally built to be monsters in WvW. You have AoE literally coming out of the kitten which will shred through zergs like nobody’s business.

come on… Staff Ele does have numerous AOE options but none of the AOEs hit very hard, and then only on the bads who are so bad they don’t see the big red circle(s).

D/D is fine but the only thing staff Ele is any good at in WVW is healing and forcing dodges for the real DPS classes to kill.

@boozer
Attunement swap is count as weapon swap, ok. But tell me, why weapon swap doesn’t stuck at one range? And have more effective skills if chosen right for build, then elementalist with his 20 skills. Plus you don’t need to use weapon which doesn’t fit your build, but you can’t turn off or change to something useful some of your attunements (for example air in condition build).
P.S. I wish devs fix elementalist’s bugs with the speed with which moderators delete my posts.