Guild Wars 2

I know that no launch is perfect. But behavior like this can and does really ruin games. Not many people come back after they initially gave up…

ThiBash.5634:

And don’t forget that most other classes combo with them mroe or less automatically. Each arrow that goes through it adds another bit of restoration. I’d say the staff fields do at least 10-25% more healing than is listed. 50% more if you got a good team and a good ele (Evasive Arcana comes to mind…I can heal myself and nearby allies for about 7k health when I roll into my own Geyser).

You can heal for so freaking much at the moment, but if evasive arcana being a blastfinisher is a bug, we are so kittening screwed and ele will lose the only thing making it viable in tPvP atm. :X
And yes, I’m aware people play roaming builds, but only because they want to, and not because they’re stronger than something else.

Snip.6138:

Right for the most part, but the staff has anything but “huge” aoe heals. Geyser is a 1.1k heal at the most, and healing rain offers no healing other than the regen. The blast combo finishers are also pretty weak, depending on the healing stat of the person applying the finisher, they range from 1.6k at the most to as little as 900-1k.

If you want to offer actual healing support, the scepter/dagger is the best for that.

Geyser ticks 3 times, so its 3k healed with a support build. Also blast Finishers heal for 1.4k if I am not mistaken, if only with a 0.1 coefficient. And the Healing Rain Heal is about 6k from regeneration… Just try it sometimes, and combo it with your own blast finishers. And Blast finishers from Evasive Arcana. never will you cite scepter for heals again.

Rieselle.5079:

I would like the Ele to still be a complex class to play – but give them the payoff to compensate.

One idea I like is to give almost every Ele skill and trait (especially the simple damage or +X% ones) a secondary effect that occurs when some condition is met.

Eg. Currently in Dagger offhand we have “Fire Grab” which does additional damage vs. burning enemies. Since we can cause burning in Flame Attune, you can get this effect in one attunement.

But there should be more!
eg.
Cross-attunement: Ride the Lightning: If enemy has Weakness, they are knocked down.

Cross-class: Shatterstone: If enemy has Poison, the poison is spread to other enemies in the AOE.

Based on Boons:
Drakes Breath: If you have Might, then the breath will immobilise them.

Traits:
Strength of Stone: Deal 10% extra damage in Earth Attunement. If the enemy is blinded, critical hits cause knockdown.

etc.

I’d love for the Ele to have all sorts of crazy complexity with skills that interact with other skills, traits, other classes, etc, and give great benefits to those that can take advantage of those effects.

I would love to see those things. Many GW1 Skills had such interactions – BUT, and here come the buts: The interactions on your own skills would just encourage another skill rotation, while in GW1 they mostly promoted cross-profession interaction. In Gw2 they were going for a simpler, more accessible approach and thus introduced combofields. Not as meaningful mostly, but more accessible. So while you and I want to see this, it might not fit into their concept of gw2. :/

I know it only says one per person, but here it goes anyways – I’ll add some more things that might be easy to do, but help playing experience:

Some Autoattacks need help:

- Staff Water needs an increased healing radius, probably also some damage, as of now it is useless in every aspect (or maybe just revamp it – I like the healing portion though)
- Staff Earth is kinda meh, Yes weakness is a nice condition, but the damage is low, and I do not know anyone that would chain weakness on a person if he or she had the choice of just dealing damage instead
- Dagger Lightning needs some usability, it should work like a weapon melee attack, so mostly hitting things caught in the swing. It just doesnt do that, heck often it even misses the intended target if either I or the target move
- Scepter Lightning needs tweaks. You either need to up the damage quite a bit as its dps is not too good (and the set does have nothing else) and/or make it not scale up, so it deals the same damage per tick
- Another problem might have arisen because elementalists have no autoattack-chains. The coefficient on Staff Fire Auto might be good (being the best we have outside of dagger) but many other classes up their dps and also burst by chain attacks, heck I can crit up to 4.5k with thief sword auto, staff fire barely scratches 2k – this might also be grounds for re-evaluation

The healing issues were already adressed by many people, let my clarify on that a bit: I know that you wanted damage to always be higher than healing. That you achieved, but the consequence was that the usefulness of Healing Power as an attribute is severly kittened in comparison to other attributes, as it only attributes to very few skills, and then on most skill only amounts for very little (And as far as I know the elementalist ist the most efficient at that).

I think a interesting possibility would be to up the healing power coefficients on many skills but compensate by healing reductions – maybe introduce some other mechanics/skills or just increase poison heal reduction to 50%? That would make for more rewarding play. I’m not working in your QA department, but crunching the numbers should not be hard (You might already have done that for current numbers, so sorry for sounding redundant).

My last point of info is:
- 0.1 on most skills and blast finishers (Should be more depending on skill, at the moment healing power makes no difference)
- up to 1.0 on main healing skills (Could also be more since you can rarely use them)
- 0.125 on regen per tick, this I am actually ok with
- .084 if i remember correctly on soothing mist/virtue of resolve (this one is tricky, as it is passive healing – but I feel It could also be more)

There is much else, but I’ll leave it at that for now – I hope this helps.

If anyone wants to do a well thought-out compendium or something, like teamleads in Dark Age of Camelot-times: I’m up for that, just send me a message Also not afraid of some number-crunching, kinda proficient in statistics :p

I noticed if you cast shatterstone of DT and are knocked down while the spell explodes, it often deals no damage at all!

MarzAttakz.9608:

It used to land faster, hit harder and was ground targeted until BWE3 where every profession complained that our RTL > Updraft> Phoenix > DT > Signet of Earth > Ring of Fire > Arcane Wave > Arcane Blast > Flame Grab burst combo was way over the top.

They nerfed it and us and everyone else learnt to dodge, that’s right, L2Dodge came from us first and eviscerate second.

Also ele skills are so kitten much easier to dodge – I dont know, are there any other spells that take 2 seconds to cast and/or another 2 to land? You can just walk out of most of them.
Eviscerate on the other hand is impossible to dodge reliably in the heat of combat.

Ender.3508:

Said this a few other times but haven’t ever seen anyone mention it: stacking combo fields e.g. Lay down W3, W4, W5 in rapid succession and arcane wave inside it grants 2 aoe heals and aoe frost armor.

That, and make certain combos more powerful bc 2sec of frost armor is f/ useless.

As far as I know only the last field triggers… :/

There are 4 main points the ele needs some love

1. The downed state, 2 needs a CC that interrupts stomps
2. We need more damage/burst on many skills (nearly every class’s auto and burst skills do waaaaay more damage, while not having to be coordinated as perfectly); mainly talking about scepter as a whole and dagger lightning skills – also more fields outside of staff
3. Also D/D needs more forms of survivability/mobility/CC to be comparable to other classes weaponsets – as of now its go in and never come out
4. Many traits need work, many Grandmaster traits are utter trash, also we need more encouragement to attunementswap, since traiting a certain way makes some attunements WAY more attractive to stay in than swapping to others (even more so without lingering elements)

Only tested out of combat, but vigorous scepter does not seem to work.

Also does Windborne Dagger work with a dagger in the offhand? If not, it needs to say it in the tooltip.

Also, spirit procs now have a 3.5 second internal cooldown…