I agree. It’s really sad that their “purpose” for the changes to the elementalist is to kick it out of being top dps. What arenanet doesn’t seem to realize is that outside of PVE, eles can not run berserker gear. I don’t know about other eles but i’m just an average player and I have to spec for survivability. As is stands, our damage in wvw is pitiful and we are pigeon-holed into healing support. None of these recent changes have given us a better chance to do damage and survive at the same time. In the meantime, thieves (who are already OP and are undoubtedly already the best killers) get all sorts of buffs. But then again, what’s new.
Except for the nerfs that seem to be geared towards making PvE ele more in line with the other classes (honestly don’t know how it compares as I don’t do raids), none of the changes impact the class at all.
So pretty much nothing – guess the person in charge is full focused only on the Weaver, because the rest is pretty much ignored.
Hmm…I don’t know. Guaranteed hits are pretty flippin’ amazing in the era of constant blocks and evades. I wonder if the guarantee portion of Lightning Storm even counts during immunities. I’ll have to test that immediately.
I strongly disagree with adding such powercreep to the game, but Anet refuses to do anything about the high damage and high sustain together, so I guess this is their solution. More damage…
I interpreted ‘guaranteed hits’ as meaning that a certain proportion of the strikes will actually land on a target rather than striking randomly within the area – they can still be blocked, evaded, and so on as normal.
I haven’t tested it, though, but that’s the way I read it.
To those who think Scarlet hate means she’s succeeded as a villain:
People don’t hate Scarlet like Game of Thrones fans hate Joffrey.
They hate her the way Star Wars fans hate Jar Jar Binks.
“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”
“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”
The circle of life I guess.
Except people are complaining that the changes were not significant to warrant conjurers being anything more than a wasted skill category for us.
But interpreted that as you will.
Edit: BTW, the absolute lack of discussion on the changes / analysis of effects sure shows the level of interest in the class and relevancy of the patch…
I’m not sure…
Haven’t had time to test yet, but with the changes to conjures and arcane, and the nerf to tempest dps we might have the good old water hammer build back.
with fire/air/water, using lightening hammer, you get to sit in water for 30% dmg bonus (piercing shards and aquamancers training), with the bonus from air (bolt to the heart, ferocious winds, tempest defense) and fire (burning rage and power overwelming) or arcane… scepter dagger for might stacks, lightening hammer, gliph of storms and arcane blast.
Edit:
Also, no more charges to FGS sounds great for wvw roaming.
They’re better than they were. Its the first time they’ve gotten serious changes / buffs in years, if not ever. Can’t really expect them to become mind-blowingly amazing in a single patch.
But that goes right back to my original point. People want them to be good, but because they aren’t good they also don’t want them to waste time on buffs that “aren’t enough”, despite the fact that if they don’t they’ll stay useless (or at the very least highly situational) forever.
Don’t really understand why they ignored Earth Shield though. I mean, I guess that’s the only one that got a serious rework prior to this patch, but that was still years ago, so I’d think another pass would be overdue.
“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”
“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”
The circle of life I guess.
Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.
More accurately
Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”
ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”
The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger, and bigger, each time he claims he is going to fix the problem.
It’s an improvement. Adds a bit of flavor to PVE. It’s definitely a lot better without charges. That alone made the shield something to play with. It doesn’t disappear in 10 seconds.
“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”
“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”
The circle of life I guess.
Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.
More accurately
Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”
ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”
The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger.
I find it odd that in another thread you’re complaining that they changed Guardian Spirit Weapons because it made them less unique in your opinion, and you seemingly would have preferred them to stay as-is despite being fairly bad skills…
Yet with conjures, which are also unique (far moreso IMO, but we probably have different opinions on that), you seem to want them dramatically changed, probably in a way that’d make them much less unique. If you still want access to all your normal weapon skills, they’d probably just become 1-shot skills like “so many other skills in the game”. Or outright removed / replaced. Because they’re fairly bad skills and in your opinion beyond help.
This change make no sence you claim you want us all to keep hold of conjured weapons longer but you nerff the summon duration from 60 seconds to 30 seconds and give us unlimited charges
NEWSFLASH even at 20 charges you are unlikely to be able to use them all in 30 seconds so makeing charges unlimited is POINTLESS all you have done is screwed over the summond weapons coz now when i want to pick up that second frost bow off the ground its not there anymore coz of that dumb 30 sec duration on conjoured weapons
and that dumb buff from the auto attack is pointless i lose more dmg than i gain for staying on frost bow rather than following my usual rotation
and then theres the nerffs to dmg skills you nerffed scepter you nerffed dager you nerffed overload air you nerffed overload fire and justify it by saying you dont want tempesat to be top dps.
It all adds up to the simple fact Anet has lost sight of what the class is supposed to be if you want to normalize our damge then you should normalise our health pool to be more inline with other classes as well while your at it coz its unfair to give tempest every penealty in the game and not reward them for it coz thats exactly the direction you are takeing us tempest is suposed to be high risk high reward all i see is high risk and in your own words normalised damage
get your act together plz im so sick of these awfull balance patches constantly feeling like an attack on the tempest again and again and again
I’m not sure…
Haven’t had time to test yet, but with the changes to conjures and arcane, and the nerf to tempest dps we might have the good old water hammer build back.
with fire/air/water, using lightening hammer, you get to sit in water for 30% dmg bonus (piercing shards and aquamancers training), with the bonus from air (bolt to the heart, ferocious winds, tempest defense) and fire (burning rage and power overwelming) or arcane… scepter dagger for might stacks, lightening hammer, gliph of storms and arcane blast.
Oh joy, I get to autoattack with a LH. Such fun! It’s totally why I rolled ele on day 1, right?
I like conjures, so I got really excited when I saw the list of changes, hoping for conjures to use the kit approach. The unlimited charges are okay but don’t fix the inherent problems with conjures (namely that they lock you out of your elements thus require a burn-skills-and-discard approach). Moreover, the unlimited charges get effectively nullified with the new 30sec duration.
What’s even more sad is that the FGS was realistically only decent as a mobility skill, and now its duration got cut in half. I don’t even..
The unlimited charges are not a good thing sure on the surface it sounds good but when you realise that they reduced the duration the weapon lasts to 30 secs you quickly realise that they only removed the 20 charges coz it it would have very quickly become apparent that you cant actualy use all 20 charges in 30 secs so this is one of those scenarios where more is actualy less
I disagree. These changes almost make me dust off my ele and for the first time in years (other than the occasional request for the fiery sword in dungeons), put them on my skillbar. Seriously years.
Last time I used them was to show a friend new to the game how cool they looked. But we both quickly tired of them because of how tedious they were to use.
With them still having a 60s base cooldown and the trait only reducing it 20%, you can’t perma use any of them. You either have to alternate between 2 or back and forth between one and your regular weapon. That’s a huge shame.
A curse on whichever designer has a mad fetish for swapping. But a blessing on whoever was behind these changes. They’re a big step in the right direction.
Except, you know, their skills aren’t good enough to warrant 30s use. FGS is the one that gives some reason to actually hold it longer, but its CD isn’t anywhere near 60s.
nerfed overload air, nerfed dagger, buffed thieves even more, nerfed conjure duration trying to frame unlimited charges as if any decent ele would use them all up in 30 seconds. at this point the second FGS is nothing but a mockery. it’s ridiculous any build outside auramancer just get’s increased risk, and risk and risk and risk and risk and risk and risk but the kittening reward get’s lower. it’s absolutely ridiculous. ele’s are not top tier damage dealers in pvp. the moment they go damage they get picked off in 2 shots if they kitten up once.
high risk, low reward/not viable in higher tiers of pvp/get’s insulted for not bieng support
Yeah they are useless and a further nerf in wvw or pve by far. Well at least I can tap lame thieves with the arcane skill now that 1500 range is helpful to keep them in combat. Other than updates are complete nerfs
RANGER trait line buffs:
Opening Strike: This trait now grants Opening Strike to both you and your pet, rather than to just you.
Enlargement: This trait has been replaced with Stoneform. Stoneform casts Lesser Signet of Stone when your health drops below the 50% health threshold, granting you temporary immunity to damage from attacks.
Rejuvenation: The internal cooldown of this trait has been reduced from 18 seconds to 10 seconds.
Other’s are mechanic changes I need to further investigate. Still better than ele so :P
Also raids or high level FOTM DPS is self applied cap made by pve elites, who bank on a broken ele mechanic that works on AI and not on real people You should ban high level FOTM or Raids since your pve players are crying. Or make it easier for them. Please don’t drag pvp or wvw down.
“Conjured weapons are garbage, they need to be buffed!”
“You buffed Conjured weapons? They’re useless, why would you waste time buffing useless things?”
The circle of life I guess.
Nice try, completely uninformed and fallacious, but nice try.
More accurately
Players: “Conjures both defy and deny us our class mechanic, which we have no innate defense or survivability without, to the point that they will never be usable, except as situational cheese.”
ANet: “Lol, we buffed ’em again.”
The way ANet treats these skills is just, it’s an exercise in insanity. It’s like having a car that doesn’t roll because the wheels are square, and when you take it to the mechanic, he fixes the problem by making the square wheels bigger.
I find it odd that in another thread you’re complaining that they changed Guardian Spirit Weapons because it made them less unique in your opinion, and you seemingly would have preferred them to stay as-is despite being fairly bad skills…
Yet with conjures, which are also unique (far moreso IMO, but we probably have different opinions on that), you seem to want them dramatically changed, probably in a way that’d make them much less unique. If you still want access to all your normal weapon skills, they’d probably just become 1-shot skills like “so many other skills in the game”. Or outright removed / replaced. Because they’re fairly bad skills and in your opinion beyond help.
Well when you take the two conversations entirely out of context, yeah I can see that, however upon exercising the particle of common sense necessary to not do that, the reasoning is completely obvious.
The two skillsets were in literally opposite states of each other prior to this patch. And it is therefore only sensible to not treat them the same.
Conjures issues were (are) mechanical, their function prevents the use of 4/5ths of the elementalists skill bar, does not activate with the majority of elementalist traits, and is contrary to the intended function of the class mechanic. And there is no amount of balance changes that are going to fix that.
Spirit weapons were merely imbalanced, while their mechanics was perfectly sound. In fact more than sound, guardians have an always present class mechanic, and a copious amount of utility and weapon skills, which scale with the amount of allies nearby. And those skills are incredibly weakened in soloist content with no allies to apply to. Spirit weapons filled an incredibly important role as sub-in allies so that all those group-centric skills could see use in more content.
If they truly wanted to buff the conjours they should just turn them into a 60 second attunement…flicking through 8
attunements would be awesome and make for some interesting play.
Just make the conjures into kits already. Remove the ground targeting summon a second weapon non-sense, roll some of the power budget from that second weapon into the kits skills and most of the conjures will probably be appealing, with maybe a few minor additional tweaks to the skills mechanics here and there.
Conjures are weaker than kits. Kits have access to lots of different conditions, crowd control and range damage. Anet would have to completely re-work the functionality of all conjure weapons. They wont because they will increase ele DPS and more people would play ele like when the game first came out. And you get the other classes screaming to nerf ele. Poor anet tries to make their customers happy. X.X
Conjures are currently weaker than kits due to their power budget being split in half because the devs assume there are always 2 copies of a conjure active at the same time. Remove that second copy, and you can consolidate the power budget and make the individual skills of the conjures stronger. After that, it would probably just take a few tweaks here and there to functionality to make conjures a perfectly valid utility option.
Fun fact guys: If you pick up the second conjured weapon before it disappears then you get to use that weapon for an additional 30 seconds. Now that the charge mechanic has been removed you can go hog wild with the first weapon for 25ish seconds then pick up the second and carry on for an additional 30, meaning that you can have a conjured weapon up nearly constantly so long as someone doesn’t pick up the second before you get back to it. I’ve been playing with the Water Hammer build ILobo mentioned above, just with the Conjurer trait for additional Lightning Leaps(loving that new Quickness) and Lightning Storms, and it has been an absolute blast.
Thanks ANet, you’ve made at least one of us happy with these changes.
Fun fact guys: If you pick up the second conjured weapon before it disappears then you get to use that weapon for an additional 30 seconds. Now that the charge mechanic has been removed you can go hog wild with the first weapon for 25ish seconds then pick up the second and carry on for an additional 30, meaning that you can have a conjured weapon up nearly constantly so long as someone doesn’t pick up the second before you get back to it. I’ve been playing with the Water Hammer build ILobo mentioned above, just with the Conjurer trait for additional Lightning Leaps(loving that new Quickness) and Lightning Storms, and it has been an absolute blast.
Thanks ANet, you’ve made at least one of us happy with these changes.
Yea, it would just be nicer if we didn’t need to rely on picking up the second one.
I’ve made a suggestion on another topic that it would be great if conjures used the new ammo/charge mechanics:
– Each conjuring skill (the utility) having 2 charges with 30 sec charge recharge (longer for FGS).
– Each charge conjures a single weapon (instead of the current two)
– conjuring the weapon on you (you are inside the AoE) gives it to you
– conjuring the weapon away from you (you are not on the AoE) places it on the ground.
this way you could keep using the weapon without having to pick up the second one, you could give one to someone (its fun in newbie areas) without having to spend both, or you could use the same way as the current functionality.
Yea, it would just be nicer if we didn’t need to rely on picking up the second one.
I’ve made a suggestion on another topic that it would be great if conjures used the new ammo/charge mechanics:
– Each conjuring skill (the utility) having 2 charges with 30 sec charge recharge (longer for FGS).
– Each charge conjures a single weapon (instead of the current two)
– conjuring the weapon on you (you are inside the AoE) gives it to you
– conjuring the weapon away from you (you are not on the AoE) places it on the ground.
this way you could keep using the weapon without having to pick up the second one, you could give one to someone (its fun in newbie areas) without having to spend both, or you could use the same way as the current functionality.
That’s a great idea, would love to see it implemented. As the skill is right now it’s very clunky for anyone like me who wants to have their conjured weapon out constantly so having that charge mechanic would be the best of both worlds, the Conjurer could choose to save the weapon for themselves or they could share it if they’d like. Hope ANet is reading this, I feel like you hit the nail on the head.
While your solution would be the ideal, I’d honestly be content if they just left it as is, it’s close enough to what I wanted that I can make it work.
If you time it right you can have nearly 100% up time with the conjure wepon as long as other do not pick up the one you put down. For things like the lighting hammer lava axe the high dps weapons its not too bad. (lava axe as better dps because of its “fire up” effect.)
The lighting hammer is fun with its auto attk and leap quickness (the first quickness effect on core ele) i just do not know what type of build would use it best.
Main : Jski Imaginary ELE (Necromancer)
Guild : OBEY (The Legacy) I call it Obay , TLC (WvW) , UNIV (other)
Server : FA
The Lightning Hammer now became Interesting. Gonna think of something and play around it for a few day.
Should be pretty fun playing it with lightning rod. Leap → Quickness → Static Field → Wind Blast → Super Speed → Lighning Storm away.
Possibly with an offhand warhorn for Cyclone and Tidal Surge.
Not really an exciting rework (like spirit weapons got, for example). Some of the new effects are interesting but not really game changing. The changes to duration/charges…reducing duration but giving unlimited charges…it feels more like a nerf than a buff to be honest.
Playing conjures forever in PvE and PvP, really not any more excited about it now, maybe less so.
Not really an exciting rework (like spirit weapons got, for example). Some of the new effects are interesting but not really game changing. The changes to duration/charges…reducing duration but giving unlimited charges…it feels more like a nerf than a buff to be honest.
Playing conjures forever in PvE and PvP, really not any more excited about it now, maybe less so.
Lighting hammer should be doing more dmg because most of its dmg was from its auto attk that would eat charges. That and now it has a quickness the first time ele as a class only effect can get. Its like ppl are playing a different game then i am or are they just not trying it out?
Main : Jski Imaginary ELE (Necromancer)
Guild : OBEY (The Legacy) I call it Obay , TLC (WvW) , UNIV (other)
Server : FA
All of the Conjures are great now. LH can be brought into zerg frontlines like a Necro might with Reaper Shroud. Axe actually has a purpose, Bow has better synergy, GS is great for mobility, and Shield can be used. LH and GS are still probably the better picks, but by removing the charges you really can go ham with whatever you’ve got.
Going ham and using all the charges is assuming little to no pressure on the elementalist. In that case, yeah it will be more dps (and lightning hammer certainly…). I like lightning hammer quickness for use with an overload, not sure how much else you’ll get out of it except a couple autos.
The 30 seconds cooldown is very welcome. Overall, those conjure buff are excellent.
I just wonder about why Earth Shield was ignored.
Shield number 4 pulled target could have been raised to 5.
Shield number 2 could have given retaliation. Damage raised too.
Earth Shield Vitality should have been changed since vitality is an hindrance. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/46bh4s/conjure_earth_shields_180_vitality_is_not_helping/
Conjures with 3/4 second cast could have been improved to 1/2 cast time.
Greatsword cooldown could have been looked into or have been untied to the 30 second changes.
EDIT: Nevermind. The cooldown remained 60 seconds and the duration of the one on the ground is 30 seconds. It’s an atrocious change.
