Guild Wars 2

I want to take a moment to discuss the vast discrepancy in base HP between the various professions. At level 80 that would be.

18372 for Warriors and Necromancers
15082 for Engineers, Rangers and Mesmers
10805 for Thieves, Elementalists and Guardians.

In case you haven’t noticed, that’s a HUGE difference in survivability just from the base HP. A Warrior has 80% more HP than an Elementalist aside from more armor etc.

I believe such an extreme difference in a stat as basic as Hit Points makes balancing unnecessarily difficult for the developers.

I mean how do you balance something like Thief Backstabs when it takes 40% HP off one profession and 80% off of another?

How do you balance boss abilities in PvE when one profession loses half of his HP in a single hit while most others are being one-shot?

There are plenty of other elements in game (armor, build, gear, etc.) that can help define your survivability. I don’t think having such a gaping difference in base HP is all that great of an idea.

Just as a reminder, WoW used to have vastly different HP pools between different classes too but dumped that concept eventually for the reasons noted above.

And let’s be honest, we wouldn’t tolerate and 80% difference (or 40%, depending on your POV) on any other stat in the game, so why this huge difference in base HP?

Mt proposal would simply be to curb the extreme differences between base HP and close them to a 2000 HP gap. That would leave the base HP as follows.

18.000 – Warriors and Necromancers
16.000 – Rangers, Engineers and Mesmers
14.000 – Thieves, Elementalists and Guardians.

I realize this might need some short-term rebalancing in certain areas but long-term I’m sure it would be better for the game.

Yeah, I agree entirely here. Such huge base HP differences are unacceptable.

It makes it even harder to balance as some ridiculously overpowered builds can be considered ‘justified’ because they’re present on 10k base HP classes… but they shouldn’t have so little HP to begin with.

It’s also funny how the three 10k HP classes (plus mesmer) are also widely considered the best in tPvP… They need to have their base HP normalized and their outlier builds brought down to par with the other classes.

Umm, you don’t seem to address the fact that eles and guardians are the 2 tankiest classes, yet they have the lowest HP…

Aga.8641:

Umm, you don’t seem to address the fact that eles and guardians are the 2 tankiest classes, yet they have the lowest HP…

That’s part of the problem. They get so many strong abilities to “compensate” for their low base HP, which inevitably ends up making them incredibly hard to kill with certain builds.

Fix the base HP, and then fix the outlier builds. It has to be done, both to make the developers’ lives easier and to fix the stagnating metagame.

Yeah, bring down the HP, rescale all the abilities, and welcome to WoW v2, right?

you can’t compare one game to the other,
i remember a friend linked me a stream of a tournament for in WoW for 3v3

and it was the most boring thing ever

fight would last from 5 to 10 mins, until 1 of the sides lost 1 member and then they all lose!

most boring thing ever! no surprise, no way of making a comeback, nothing! it was always the same! over and over again!

Its balanced because:

1.) Thieves single target DPS more reliably than Warriors but is easily more vulnerable to the CC which is “death.”
2.) Necros have no Stability but are useful anyways. Still unforgiving but question is.. why are you worked up about the HP pool again for Necros?
3.) Warriors not being able to gap close easily makes that HP pool balanced because now that gives them incentive to still go aggressive.
4.) Guardian’s sustain-ability should take skill. It used to not take skill but now it does specially with the fact that Guardian’s HP is pretty low.
5.) Ranger is a legit jack of all trades. They can spec for both condition damage and damage per second while having okay survivability. So I guess their HP pool must be somewhat faithful to the theme.

Only one that’s really imbalanced is Mesmer HP pool. It should be 10k base at level 80. And they should never be able to be invulnerable if they mess up.

ConterK.3972:

Yeah, bring down the HP, rescale all the abilities, and welcome to WoW v2, right?

you can’t compare one game to the other,
i remember a friend linked me a stream of a tournament for in WoW for 3v3

and it was the most boring thing ever

fight would last from 5 to 10 mins, until 1 of the sides lost 1 member and then they all lose!

most boring thing ever! no surprise, no way of making a comeback, nothing! it was always the same! over and over again!

That has absolutely nothing to do with HP counts and almost everything to do with the balance of offense and defense and the trinity system (with dedicated healers and everything).

As it is, we’re already trending towards such boring play thanks to the unbreakable bunker builds (two of which are, unsurprisingly, on two of the 10k HP classes). Those MUST be fixed, almost everyone is in agreement here.

(With this caliber of “feedback”, the devs really have their hands full…)

Its balanced because:
[snip]

You completely missed the point.

In case you’re too lazy to go back and re-read, the point is that balancing is considerably easier when the range is smaller. As it is, the game is far from balanced and, frankly, only the most delusional players would even think to deign it so. It needs work. LOTS of it.

Yeah eles and guards maybe the toughest to kill as of now, that’s because they are pigeon holed into taking defensive gear to compensate for their ridiculously low health.

Try running a power prec toughness armor set up on an ele without speccing into vitality and see how that works for you. We HAVE to either spec into vitality and run with 13k health and run tanky gear so we don’t get 2 shotted.

The base health differences is frustrating to say the least. I can stack all damage and only some toughness gear on my necro and warrior because I don’t even have to worry about vitality, my ele thief and guard I am completely screwed on stats, I had to pick up vitality (not an option to run with 10k health in PVE or pvp) then my ele is in light armor on top of that so I have to stack toughness or healing power or both, to avoid insta gib, Good-luck fitting damage stats in there.

It’s making balance difficult and pigeon hoping players into having to spec or gear up for defense just to not get one shotted.

Zyrusticae.7245:

Aga.8641:

Umm, you don’t seem to address the fact that eles and guardians are the 2 tankiest classes, yet they have the lowest HP…

That’s part of the problem. They get so many strong abilities to “compensate” for their low base HP, which inevitably ends up making them incredibly hard to kill with certain builds.

Fix the base HP, and then fix the outlier builds. It has to be done, both to make the developers’ lives easier and to fix the stagnating metagame.

Yea pvp and pve are supposed to be balanced differently… but so far the only example im aware of is confusion. Seems like the devs could embrace this more.

Condition damage seems like a natural counter, but isnt.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Yeah eles and guards maybe the toughest to kill as of now, that’s because they are pigeon holed into taking defensive gear to compensate for their ridiculously low health.

Try running a power prec toughness armor set up on an ele without speccing into vitality and see how that works for you. We HAVE to either spec into vitality and run with 13k health and run tanky gear so we don’t get 2 shotted.

The base health differences is frustrating to say the least. I can stack all damage and only some toughness gear on my necro and warrior because I don’t even have to worry about vitality, my ele thief and guard I am completely screwed on stats, I had to pick up vitality (not an option to run with 10k health in PVE or pvp) then my ele is in light armor on top of that so I have to stack toughness or healing power or both, to avoid insta gib, Good-luck fitting damage stats in there.

It’s making balance difficult and pigeon hoping players into having to spec or gear up for defense just to not get one shotted.

I run Power, Precision, and Toughness on my Elementalist with Knights Amulet and made it to Rank 21. I usually die about every 5 or 6 kills. People do not understand how to kite back to thier group or when to disengage. Theif? Mist Form, Teleport, RtL, Shocking Aura, almost unlimited Swiftness and Might. Hit Points are not really a factor when you add utility to a class. Every once in a while someone catches you with no CC break, guess what…you die. It’s not because they were better, it just happens. I could see where people could make the argument about Hit Points if the difference was huge, but if you factor utility, mobility, CC, and DPS all into the equation (and player skill) it seems pretty balanced.

Learn how to move and pick your fights, you won’t need 24K hit points as a crutch.

@suctum: youre playing 8v8 or stomping forests of nifelhel repeatedly in 5v5… ive done my share of that.

These arent really considered to be competitive.

The devs havnt come out and said which pvp modes they plan to balance for, but most of the community assumes, safetly i think, that 5v5 high end tournaments are the target.

All sorts of bad things are viable in 8v8, like glass theives. Which are so imba in 8v8 that they may require changing… but in 5v5 they really arent that big of an issue.

Zyrusticae.7245:

ConterK.3972:

Yeah, bring down the HP, rescale all the abilities, and welcome to WoW v2, right?

you can’t compare one game to the other,
i remember a friend linked me a stream of a tournament for in WoW for 3v3

and it was the most boring thing ever

fight would last from 5 to 10 mins, until 1 of the sides lost 1 member and then they all lose!

most boring thing ever! no surprise, no way of making a comeback, nothing! it was always the same! over and over again!

That has absolutely nothing to do with HP counts and almost everything to do with the balance of offense and defense and the trinity system (with dedicated healers and everything).

As it is, we’re already trending towards such boring play thanks to the unbreakable bunker builds (two of which are, unsurprisingly, on two of the 10k HP classes). Those MUST be fixed, almost everyone is in agreement here.

(With this caliber of “feedback”, the devs really have their hands full…)

It has to do with what the OP said,
Scale the HP and skill dmg all over again,
“WoW removed the HP difference eventually” he said! etc etc
pretty much asking to make the game PvP exactly like WoW! wich i dont really see why would we want that

being tanky and surviving has very few to do with the amount of HP you have, with thief backstabing for 12k, i dont think u would survive much just because you have 20k hp instead of 15k!
if you dont dodge, go invul, evade attack, break stuns, block, get aegis, etc
you aint gonna survive no matter how much hp you have!
surviveablity is based more in what skills you have and how you use them!

ConterK.3972:

It has to do with what the OP said,
Scale the HP and skill dmg all over again,
“WoW removed the HP difference eventually” he said! etc etc
pretty much asking to make the game PvP exactly like WoW! wich i dont really see why would we want that

being tanky and surviving has very few to do with the amount of HP you have, with thief backstabing for 12k, i dont think u would survive much just because you have 20k hp instead of 15k!
if you dont dodge, go invul, evade attack, break stuns, block, get aegis, etc
you aint gonna survive no matter how much hp you have!
surviveablity is based more in what skills you have and how you use them!

People like you are why we can’t have nice things. You see one word “WoW” and immediately jump to a forgone conclusion without spending a second to think about what I typed and in what context it was.

Nowhere did I say or even imply that GW2 PvP should be anything like that in WoW. All I did was give an example of another MMO where the designers originally took the same stance on character HP, only to change their stance further along the way.

It was an example, nothing more, nothing less, so stop riding the hyperbole.

All I’m saying, and all I ever said on this matter was that the developers are making balancing unnecessarily difficult for themselves by having such a big discrepancy in base HP. This is as much an issue for PvP as it is for PvE.

Take for example and encounter designer. He wants to create a boss ability that will be threatening to players without one-shotting anything but a glass-cannon build.

How much damage should such an ability deal? 10.000 and the Warrior will just “yawn” . 15000 and the Thief will complain about getting one-shot.

It’s not impossible to pull off, but very difficult.

By having base-HP closer together they’d alleviate some of that balancing pressure by requiring less extremes. Elementalists wouldn’t have to mitigate 80% damage in order to attain decent survivability and Guardians could also have somewhat less mitigation without being less durable.

Dee Jay.2460:

I want to take a moment to discuss the vast discrepancy in base HP between the various professions. At level 80 that would be.

18372 for Warriors and Necromancers
15082 for Engineers, Rangers and Mesmers
10805 for Thieves, Elementalists and Guardians.

And yet 2 of the 3 bunker almost unkillable classes in the game are tada ele’s and guardians followed by mesmer.

So you see higher HP pool doesn’t mean as much as you think it does.

Latinkuro.9420:

Dee Jay.2460:

I want to take a moment to discuss the vast discrepancy in base HP between the various professions. At level 80 that would be.

18372 for Warriors and Necromancers
15082 for Engineers, Rangers and Mesmers
10805 for Thieves, Elementalists and Guardians.

And yet 2 of the 3 bunker almost unkillable classes in the game are tada ele’s and guardians followed by mesmer.

So you see higher HP pool doesn’t mean as much as you think it does.

It means exactly what I think: That the designers were forced to givem them massive mitigation abilities in order to compensate for their lack of HP.

Did you even read my previous post?

If Guardians and Elementalists had a little more HP, they’d need less excessive mitigation abilities and thus things would be more balanced.

Is it really too much to ask for people to read and understand before posting?

Suctum.6912:

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Yeah eles and guards maybe the toughest to kill as of now, that’s because they are pigeon holed into taking defensive gear to compensate for their ridiculously low health.

Try running a power prec toughness armor set up on an ele without speccing into vitality and see how that works for you. We HAVE to either spec into vitality and run with 13k health and run tanky gear so we don’t get 2 shotted.

The base health differences is frustrating to say the least. I can stack all damage and only some toughness gear on my necro and warrior because I don’t even have to worry about vitality, my ele thief and guard I am completely screwed on stats, I had to pick up vitality (not an option to run with 10k health in PVE or pvp) then my ele is in light armor on top of that so I have to stack toughness or healing power or both, to avoid insta gib, Good-luck fitting damage stats in there.

It’s making balance difficult and pigeon hoping players into having to spec or gear up for defense just to not get one shotted.

I run Power, Precision, and Toughness on my Elementalist with Knights Amulet and made it to Rank 21. I usually die about every 5 or 6 kills. People do not understand how to kite back to thier group or when to disengage. Theif? Mist Form, Teleport, RtL, Shocking Aura, almost unlimited Swiftness and Might. Hit Points are not really a factor when you add utility to a class. Every once in a while someone catches you with no CC break, guess what…you die. It’s not because they were better, it just happens. I could see where people could make the argument about Hit Points if the difference was huge, but if you factor utility, mobility, CC, and DPS all into the equation (and player skill) it seems pretty balanced.

Learn how to move and pick your fights, you won’t need 24K hit points as a crutch.

I’m running 13k base health on my ele, with healing power toughness and power. All I’m saying is that because of the low base health of the class, our stat allocation is more kittened than the other classes when it comes to choices. Im running bunker style dagger build, but that’s just because I’m not really a big fan of glass cannon play style. I ran around with base health on my ele for a bit with a lot of toughness, but the survivability comes more with healing power for me. I rock same cantrips but armor of earth instead (stability too good to pass up for me) at rank 20 now. We would have more options if our base health was more in line with the others, especially with the melee play style of daggers, light armor and the low base health make defensive builds popular which is adding to the “bunker” problem. They gave each of the 3 lowest hp classes abilities to compensate for the low hp, eles heals, guardians defensive abilities, and thieves stealth, and which of these do you not see being complained about on the forums haha.

It’s just like AoC Blueprint. People complain about Assassins because it’s a noob friendly class. You don’t need skill or time invested into the class/toon to do well, just spam DWW and GC/Bomb and always get at least 1 kill per death. It would be different if it was like the DT, where everyone see’s a handful of people do well, make the class, gear it out, and find out other than being extremely tanky they can’t find a way to make it work. Elementalist is like the DT in this game, people just have not realised how incredibly OP it actually is played right.

Same with Theives in this game, no learning curve and 80% of the popualtion runs the same gimick build. People complain about it because within seconds of getting kitten on you see you were killed by clearly a terrible player as they keyboard turn away. The difference in this game is that unlike AoC where Sins had pretty much only Acclerate to get away, here you have 3 or 4 or even 5 ways to get away if you some how blunder the gimick steal BS, C&D, and spams of Heartbreaker.

As for the Elementalist, there is a build that allows you to have the power of a Glass Cannon while remaining somewhat tanky, but you have to use the right gems and consistently keep combo fields up to keep that 15 stacks of might and hold rage for 20 seconds at a time.

I still stand by the fact that for me at least, I see no problem with hit points. Of course I have been playing a clothie for years, so low hit point pools and kitteny defense is something I’m used too. It’s not for everyone, and in fact…the few times I log into AoC lately and I play my Guard or DT I feel like a raid boss because I can jump into 3 or 4 guys, kill one or two and get out with still over 1/3 of my Hit Points intact.

Disagree with OP, elementalists and thieves glass cannons (already strong) don’t need a buff and necromancers (not that strong) don’t need a nerf.

You probably could do the same with adjusting vitality multiplier and not buff glass cannons in the process.

Suctum.6912:

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Yeah eles and guards maybe the toughest to kill as of now, that’s because they are pigeon holed into taking defensive gear to compensate for their ridiculously low health.

Try running a power prec toughness armor set up on an ele without speccing into vitality and see how that works for you. We HAVE to either spec into vitality and run with 13k health and run tanky gear so we don’t get 2 shotted.

The base health differences is frustrating to say the least. I can stack all damage and only some toughness gear on my necro and warrior because I don’t even have to worry about vitality, my ele thief and guard I am completely screwed on stats, I had to pick up vitality (not an option to run with 10k health in PVE or pvp) then my ele is in light armor on top of that so I have to stack toughness or healing power or both, to avoid insta gib, Good-luck fitting damage stats in there.

It’s making balance difficult and pigeon hoping players into having to spec or gear up for defense just to not get one shotted.

I run Power, Precision, and Toughness on my Elementalist with Knights Amulet and made it to Rank 21. I usually die about every 5 or 6 kills. People do not understand how to kite back to thier group or when to disengage. Theif? Mist Form, Teleport, RtL, Shocking Aura, almost unlimited Swiftness and Might. Hit Points are not really a factor when you add utility to a class. Every once in a while someone catches you with no CC break, guess what…you die. It’s not because they were better, it just happens. I could see where people could make the argument about Hit Points if the difference was huge, but if you factor utility, mobility, CC, and DPS all into the equation (and player skill) it seems pretty balanced.

Learn how to move and pick your fights, you won’t need 24K hit points as a crutch.

“Make it to rank 21”?

There is no making it… It is inevitable. You’re not climbing a ladder. You’re just leveling an experience bar which can be done by losing games. I’m rank 15 in spvp and I’ve literally played it for about 10 days since launch. Rank in spvp is not an accomplishment. Just like hitting lvl 80 in PVE is more inevitable than an accomplishment.

Make it to rank 21 with less than 500 games played? Scoring 200+ points 80% of my matches in pug minis alone is an accomplishment considering how terrible most people are….on an Elementalist no less.

Dee Jay.2460:

ConterK.3972:

It has to do with what the OP said,
Scale the HP and skill dmg all over again,
“WoW removed the HP difference eventually” he said! etc etc
pretty much asking to make the game PvP exactly like WoW! wich i dont really see why would we want that

being tanky and surviving has very few to do with the amount of HP you have, with thief backstabing for 12k, i dont think u would survive much just because you have 20k hp instead of 15k!
if you dont dodge, go invul, evade attack, break stuns, block, get aegis, etc
you aint gonna survive no matter how much hp you have!
surviveablity is based more in what skills you have and how you use them!

People like you are why we can’t have nice things. You see one word “WoW” and immediately jump to a forgone conclusion without spending a second to think about what I typed and in what context it was.

Nowhere did I say or even imply that GW2 PvP should be anything like that in WoW. All I did was give an example of another MMO where the designers originally took the same stance on character HP, only to change their stance further along the way.

It was an example, nothing more, nothing less, so stop riding the hyperbole.

All I’m saying, and all I ever said on this matter was that the developers are making balancing unnecessarily difficult for themselves by having such a big discrepancy in base HP. This is as much an issue for PvP as it is for PvE.

Take for example and encounter designer. He wants to create a boss ability that will be threatening to players without one-shotting anything but a glass-cannon build.

How much damage should such an ability deal? 10.000 and the Warrior will just “yawn” . 15000 and the Thief will complain about getting one-shot.

It’s not impossible to pull off, but very difficult.

By having base-HP closer together they’d alleviate some of that balancing pressure by requiring less extremes. Elementalists wouldn’t have to mitigate 80% damage in order to attain decent survivability and Guardians could also have somewhat less mitigation without being less durable.

So we dont have nice things? i find the current sPvP and WvW very nice, ty!

1 Skill that hits 10k? easy, dodge it! :S
i see why u are saying that HP difference makes balance harder, u dont know the rest of the mechanics! lol

Also, what if it makes balancing harder ?(wich makes no sense to me at all, but just going with what u said) they pulled it off, as you can see the players with the less HP can be the tankier ones!

And you know why you cant use WoW example to compare with GW2 system? because is not the same, ther’s no holy trinity here, ther’s no designed “healer” or designed “tank” or designed “DPS”!
therefore u cant say
<Look, WoW did this and this and this, you should follow their footsteps because it “worked” for them!>

i wasnt jumping on conclusions, but that whole example just showed how little you actually know about balance and this game systems!

Dee Jay.2460:

I want to take a moment to discuss the vast discrepancy in base HP between the various professions. At level 80 that would be.

18372 for Warriors and Necromancers
15082 for Engineers, Rangers and Mesmers
10805 for Thieves, Elementalists and Guardians.

hp means nothing when you got bunkers who can hold off 3 to 4 people beating on it

guardians are well known for this but the list also include elementalist and engineeers
these are the classes with the lowest hp yet they seem overpowered in what they do. if anthing the other classes need more hp.

I honestly think Anet gave certain classes lower health pools because of their defensive capabilities. I doubt they randomly gave classes different pools and then adjusted abilities accordingly.
Anywho, yes with less difference in health balancing is easier, but no I don’t like it because it’s dull / less interesting to standardize everything just so you have to put less effort into balancing it. They’ll get the balance right eventually.

45~% less BASE health makes balancing harder, but so does having 8 different classes with 5 traitlines, a couple dozen utilities and 6~ weapons.
None of that is going to change though.

If you have a complaint about a specific role (since it seems like you do) that should be your focus?
Ele’s and guardians have a fair deal to make up for their lack of health, sure that’s a given.
Engi’s are only good because of bombs.
I mean only viable, like at all (from what I’ve seen), so they have their own set of issues…
Anyways, bunkers being extremely tough to kill, that is a ‘problem’ that has been posted a billion times.

Soooo…bunker guardians with 14k base hp? LOL

Archaon.6245:

Soooo…bunker guardians with 14k base hp? LOL

You didn’t read the thread I’m guessing?

Their defensive capabilities would be adjusted accordingly. It’s not just oh add 4k more health to the guardian and ele and thief the way they are now, that wouldn’t make any sense.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Archaon.6245:

Soooo…bunker guardians with 14k base hp? LOL

You didn’t read the thread I’m guessing?

Their defensive capabilities would be adjusted accordingly. It’s not just oh add 4k more health to the guardian and ele and thief the way they are now, that wouldn’t make any sense.

That’s the thing, that’s an unneeded change!!
why change it if its already working propertly right now?

Yet warrior is not in a great spot in spvp and tpvp and necro is perhaps the worst class in the game.

HP is nothing, give me active skills to avoid damage.

The problem as stated by the OP quite accurately, is that by giving some classes such small health pools they then must buy survivability, thus limiting their class options. Suddenly, I have to put half my traits an d most of my gear into defense, just to survive adequately. By that stage I might as well make a bunker, as I can’t trait enough dps to do that effectively.

With my Warrior I mainly spec damage and I still have survivability. With my Guardian I can’t do that, I need to put over half my resources into defense or I drop like a fly.

Relentliss.2170:

The problem as stated by the OP quite accurately, is that by giving some classes such small health pools they then must buy survivability, thus limiting their class options. Suddenly, I have to put half my traits an d most of my gear into defense, just to survive adequately. By that stage I might as well make a bunker, as I can’t trait enough dps to do that effectively.

That’s a lie.
I’ve seen plenty of effective offensive guardians/eles….
The meta just doesn’t really fit what they do though.

Not really. A warrior is obviously way squishier than a guardian, for example. They’re almost easy kills. And that’s because of mainly utility problems. That’s more important than health, but a large margin.

Although obviously any element can complicate things.

Dee Jay.2460:

It means exactly what I think: That the designers were forced to givem them massive mitigation abilities in order to compensate for their lack of HP.

The devs weren’t forced to do anything. They’re the ones who did both of these things. Intentionally. If they thought having everyone have almost the same health pool size was a good idea, they would have done it.

I think you’re falsely associating health numbers with the bunker problem, that the two are somehow the same issue. They aren’t. They’re already going to resolve that. Health overall means almost next to nothing in this game. Look at bosses. How hard are they to kill? They’re not. And they have literally millions of health in some cases. Millions. Health is the afterthought, not the skills. They design the skills the way they want them, and THEN the developers adjust the health values. Again, what matters are the skills. The health numbers are almost completely irrelevant, especially when a Thief can basically one-shot any class in the game in a couple of seconds, regardless of their health, as long as the target is stunned or caught off guard, or so on. Health does not matter. At all. It’s a minor supplement to classes that have no innate utility. Note how Warriors and Necromancers have the highest health. Neither of those is exactly exploding with utility options. Necros moreso than Warriors, but it’s obvious those health points are just buffer values to help the classes buy some time while better classes pound the crap out of them.

garethh.3518:

That’s a lie.
I’ve seen plenty of effective offensive guardians/eles….
The meta just doesn’t really fit what they do though.

As an elementalist player, I would like to understand this. Condition damage is strong, and I suppose the current meta doesn’t encourage much that playstyle. Burst elementalists are pretty much a worse thief at everything: less damage, easier-to-avoid attacks, no stealth, lesser margin for error, less defense (aka = they die even faster). Spike elementalists don’t exist, because they must interrupt their own spikes to defend themselves in power builds or else they die. Which means there’s no spiking at all.

What do you have against my necro having a ton of HP, its not like they are the most mobile class, or having 5-6 ways to migrate damage ether. We do have fantastic condition removal/transfer though.

We need that hp to buy us time to eat away at everyone else’s life in the game unless its a power/crit necro then they need the life so they can take the beating to get close to you to Well Bomb you down. DS can only do so much because it has no defenses and almost no synergy with condition builds at all.

All that health doesnt buy us much time ether against good burst class’s like thief and warrior. Warriors I can atleast kite around and dodge the attacks i should. Thieves are alittle harder because I cant always tell if its steal or just a stealth to recover HP so i waste dodges. Back to Hp though, it doesnt buy as much time as you think. Thives and ele’s, and guardians can be some of the hardest class’s to kill.

WOW. The OP is right, balancing classes would be easier if hp pools were closer in size.

The other side of this argument is that balance is reasonably attained without sacrificing unique play styles for each class.

My opinion is that the op is right. Elementalist is pidgeon holed into just one real build (30 water 30 arcane) and its because they lack survivability any other way.

Can this be addressed through careful balancing? Yes. Do i think arenanet will do it right? Well… maybe we can wait a few more months but im not optomistic.

DiogoSilva.7089:

garethh.3518:

That’s a lie.
I’ve seen plenty of effective offensive guardians/eles….
The meta just doesn’t really fit what they do though.

As an elementalist player, I would like to understand this. Condition damage is strong, and I suppose the current meta doesn’t encourage much that playstyle. Burst elementalists are pretty much a worse thief at everything: less damage, easier-to-avoid attacks, no stealth, lesser margin for error, less defense (aka = they die even faster). Spike elementalists don’t exist, because they must interrupt their own spikes to defend themselves in power builds or else they die. Which means there’s no spiking at all.

Aah, pure burst dps they are mediocre.
But so is near every class compared to the thief (besides probly warrior).

Offensive, that’s what I said, offensively, they do fine enough.
One of the few specs I have trouble with in deuls are well played s/d eles… and I was beating the vast, vast majority of people in deuls.