Guild Wars 2

Some disagreements:

Fire stats: I did some number crunching a while back, and the way the damage formula appears to work, power just outshines precision. In fact a rough approximation of my findings is that the damage scaling from the fire and air trees is about the same, but fire does it through only one stat leaving room for condition duration. I don’t really see how fire’s stats could be rated okay, while air is rated excellent.

Burning Precision: Honestly I think people over estimate crit proc rates. Try this out on a golem in the mists, even with 50% crit rate it just doesn’t proc very often. Plus our trait lines don’t really support precision/condition builds which means you are probably running power/precision and getting low burn damage. Also last I tested it was only 1s of burning which not only is just plain weak but means that it doesn’t scale well with condition/burn duration as it relies on stacking with another burn to gain anything.

Conjurer: The problem with this trait is not simply that conjures aren’t popular, but rather how conjures are used. Most conjures aren’t worth holding onto even if they are worth using, you burn your cooldowns then drop it because the auto attacks are weak. Only Lightning Hammer and Greatsword have decent auto attacks, so this trait isn’t even useful for a lot of conjures.

Weak Spot: Another crit proc that I think is overrated. It’s not bad, but often you will be getting only around 3 stacks of vulnerability, even with fast attack rates like Arc Lightning. It’s a bit better than our 5% damage traits given the ally support, but not by much. I just wouldn’t rate it excellent.

Aeromancer’s Alacrity: This trait is pretty good in PvP for D/D and S/D. Lower cooldowns on Updraft and Shocking Aura which are both really critical spells. For S/D you get Updraft, and the lower cooldown on Lightning Strike also adds DPS, plus air is a good auto attack attunement for power scepter so you will use it a fair amount.

Tempest Defense: The problem with this trait is that it triggers on ranged disables, but the aura only works in melee. Combine that with 90s cooldown and it will often be on cooldown when you actually need it.

Rock Solid: Totally disagree. This trait has tons of applications. You can use stability to cover important channeled spells like Churning Earth or Ether Renewal (or any heal really) which often get interrupted in PvP. In addition you can use it to stomp players. Rather than comparing it to Elemental Attunement, combine them, now you have a mini Armor of Earth on 9-11s cooldown, and the stability gets extended by your boon duration. It takes some good timing, but you can also use it to straight up counter any stun that you can see coming. Stability is so useful in PvP, even if it’s short.

Arcane Precision: It’s bad. A 10% proc chance is just terrible, and the effects aren’t all that strong, it’s weaker than Burning Precision or Weak Spot by a huge margin, and those traits aren’t that strong to begin with.

Some disagreements:

Fire stats: I did some number crunching a while back, and the way the damage formula appears to work, power just outshines precision. In fact a rough approximation of my findings is that the damage scaling from the fire and air trees is about the same, but fire does it through only one stat leaving room for condition duration. I don’t really see how fire’s stats could be rated okay, while air is rated excellent.

Burning Precision: Honestly I think people over estimate crit proc rates. Try this out on a golem in the mists, even with 50% crit rate it just doesn’t proc very often. Plus our trait lines don’t really support precision/condition builds which means you are probably running power/precision and getting low burn damage. Also last I tested it was only 1s of burning which not only is just plain weak but means that it doesn’t scale well with condition/burn duration as it relies on stacking with another burn to gain anything.

Conjurer: The problem with this trait is not simply that conjures aren’t popular, but rather how conjures are used. Most conjures aren’t worth holding onto even if they are worth using, you burn your cooldowns then drop it because the auto attacks are weak. Only Lightning Hammer and Greatsword have decent auto attacks, so this trait isn’t even useful for a lot of conjures.

Weak Spot: Another crit proc that I think is overrated. It’s not bad, but often you will be getting only around 3 stacks of vulnerability, even with fast attack rates like Arc Lightning. It’s a bit better than our 5% damage traits given the ally support, but not by much. I just wouldn’t rate it excellent.

Aeromancer’s Alacrity: This trait is pretty good in PvP for D/D and S/D. Lower cooldowns on Updraft and Shocking Aura which are both really critical spells. For S/D you get Updraft, and the lower cooldown on Lightning Strike also adds DPS, plus air is a good auto attack attunement for power scepter or MH dagger so you will use it a fair amount.

Tempest Defense: The problem with this trait is that it triggers on ranged disables, but the aura only works in melee. Combine that with 90s cooldown and it will often be on cooldown when you actually need it.

Rock Solid: Totally disagree. This trait has tons of applications. You can use stability to cover important channeled spells like Churning Earth or Ether Renewal (or any heal really) which often get interrupted in PvP. In addition you can use it to stomp players. Rather than comparing it to Elemental Attunement, combine them, now you have a mini Armor of Earth on 9-11s cooldown, and the stability gets extended by your boon duration. It takes some good timing, but you can also use it to straight up counter any stun that you can see coming. Stability is so useful in PvP, even if it’s short.

Arcane Precision: It’s bad. A 10% proc chance is just terrible, and the effects aren’t all that strong, it’s weaker than Burning Precision or Weak Spot by a huge margin, and those traits aren’t that strong to begin with.

Unless it’s a new bug, the wiki is wrong, go test the skill in the mists. Don’t trust the wiki, or even tooltips, lots of stuff is just plain wrong.

Evasive Arcana is a great trait, it’s essentially a bunch of free spells, instant cast. It’s kind of similar to having all the 15 point minors except more condition based, a bunch of free instant spells every 10 seconds or so. Earth could use a buff, just something like more bleeds for shorter duration.

While it sucks that we got nerfed, EA was way too strong relative to other traits. Even in its nerfed form it’s still one of the better tier 3 traits. In the long run EA would hold us back in build diversity by forcing yet more 30 arcane builds. The problem is that we don’t have that build diversity yet, so that long term assessment is hoping for things to change.

ens.9854:

Random elements are a tried and true element of competitive contests, players should never feel like the winners have been predetermined. There is no sport where the most skilled player wins EVERY time; and if this requires a certain amount of RNG to be added to the game, then sure as hell it belongs there.

Comparing a video game to the Olympics is not a fair comparison; you are forgetting that games are as much a test of strategy and tactics as much as skill. But even so, there is still randomness in those sports as well; any player could have an ‘off’ day, the weather might not suit their training, their equipment could fail; if we wanted to find the absolute best, we wouldn’t try to determine it by a single result (world records are often better than Olympic records).

Poker, one of the most purely strategic and successful games around, has an inherently huge amount of randomness; it is basically pure luck on any given day. The most successful e-sports are only made more exciting because there is a chance of “build order win”, an essentially random situation that players must accept if they adopt high risk high reward strategies.

A more practical argument: Like hell I want this game to be about skill with its single server location and unresponsive targetting.

edit: I realize people may try to pick this apart on an argument by argument basis and claim that it is therefore completely false. I simply ask that you let players worse than you have their victories to keep them, and you, interested in the game. There is always a chance you might lose no matter how good you are, and that is appropriate.

Any competition will have unknown factors, things beyond our control that can influence the outcome. But the question is whether you need intentionally add RNG. Let’s take two example games that have already been mentioned in this thread, poker, and chess, and augment their RNG properties, then we can try the same exercise with GW2.

First we taker poker, and we remove the randomness. Now you have a whole different game. Bluffing doesn’t make sense if you know what the cards are. At best it’s a game about how well you can memorize the deck. Not the kind of thing that really grabs your interest.

Next we take chess, and we add RNG. Each time you take a piece you roll a die, and on a 1 you lose your piece instead. Does this make chess a better game? I’d say it doesn’t, chess between very skilled players is interesting and unpredictable due to its complexity, the competition is about who can plan more turns ahead and that die roll can destroy so much effort. At the very least the game is again, completely different. Adapting to the die roll doesn’t really add a new skill any more than adapting to your opponent making a totally unexpected move. It does increase the number of possible outcomes, but chess is already complex enough that you can’t plan for every possibility anyways.

And lastly, we consider GW2. Let’s take the easiest conversion to purely non-rng. We just calculate the average damage caused by crits, and use that as a modifier for damage. For proc rates you calculate the average chance of proccing, and convert that into every 1 out of every X hits causes a proc. So 50% crit chance with 200% crit multiplier (so 50 prowess) simply becomes 150% damage multiplier for all hits instead. 60% proc rate with 50% crit chance is a 30% chance to proc, so that becomes 3 out of every 10 hits, which gets spread out as something like the third, sixth and tenth hit causes a proc. Lots of math, and a pretty kludgy fix I admit. But what about gameplay? It’s a lot more predictable, builds might change to take advantage of rounding errors in proc rates, but mostly it’s the same game. When you take the RNG out of guildwars it doesn’t become a totally different game the way poker does.

I do understand that games lacking RNG are more punishing to new players, but the unpredictability of high level play doesn’t necessarily become more predictable. Chess games between two highly skilled players are not predetermined affairs. It’s only when one player is much better that the outcome becomes highly predictable. Guild Wars 2 already has a huge gap between experienced teams and newbs, so the RNG doesn’t even seem achieve much for newbs. But it does hurt the experience for equally matched players where the outcome is already unpredictable without RNG.

ThiBash.5634:

EatThisShoe.5136:

No, you can literally get more healing by swapping than you could by staying in water. It’s not just Healing Ripple, but also regen from Elemental Attunement, and if you take Lingering Elements then your Soothing Mist is extended outside of water attunement anyways, and all those arcane traits build up into Evasive Arcana for another heal. Plus if you never attune to earth you can’t use Eruption to combo finish your water fields. And that’s all just counting the healing. You also prevent damage through CC, blinds, protection, etc. so if you prioritized healing you would be losing damage mitigation overall.

Healing bunker builds are a very common elementalist build in tournaments, and they don’t stay in water just to spam Water Blast, they would die. And most of them are 30 arcane. Healing is not a sub-optimal build, it’s been explored extensively, but staying in water IS a sub-optimal way to play a healing build.

You’re misinterpeting what I’m trying to say. I’m not claiming by any means that the best way to play a ‘healing build’ is to spam Water Blast all day. However, what I mean to say is that, under some circumstances, staying in Water a while longer and spamming Water Blast can be a viable tactic. Especially if you’re supporting a melee’s own healing skills (and they already have regeneration for example).

It would mostly apply to situations where going into close range isn’t an option, but your long range heals are on cooldown. Take the champion karka for example. You don’t wanna be close to that thing. But if you got your earth elemental to tank it, it can stay alive a good while longer if you cast a few water blasts on it. Especially if you have a large group of people tossing around other effects.

Again, it’s not a solid long term strategy. But it can be a good short term tactic, in specific situations. That’s all I ever meant to say.

You might call it misinterpreting, but I am staying on topic from the posts I quoted previously. You responded to my post, which quoted seetoo who is claiming elementalist is not balanced around swapping attunements. His arguments revolve primarily around traits, and the existence of a staff build that stays only in fire for max DPS at the expense of all else. Rather than get into a pointless argument over whether that build is any good, I simply challenged that his premise is false unless there are builds that benefit from staying in one attunement for every attunement.

That context is important. I don’t think anyone will disagree that situationally you can benefit from staying in one attunement. We were talking about builds and how the elementalist is balanced. And even the healing builds heal more when swapping.

I went ahead and got some numbers from a pvp bunker build, 1283 healing power:

Healing Ripple: 2580
Regen: 290/s
Soothing Mist: 144/s
Blast Finisher: 1500ish (it’s really hard to read because the combo heart covers it)
Water Blast: 498 with 1.4s cast time (yes, the tooltip is wrong)

So with a 30 Arcane build you have 9.375s attunement cooldown, and you spend at least 2s in water attunement due to global cooldown. So that’s a theoretical minimum of 11.375s between each time you can attune to water.

In that time you can cast 8.125 water blasts for 4046 healing.
You would also gain 11.375s of soothing mist for 1638 healing.
Total: 5684

If you swap out instead, assuming you cast no water blasts since your time in water is spent casting fields:
1 Healing Ripple for 2580
1 Blast Finisher for 1500
6s of regen for 1740
7s of soothing mist for 1008 (2s in water, and 5s from lingering attunements)
Total: 6828 give or take however off I am on the blast finisher.

If you want to get technical with the water field cooldowns you could make the argument that you only get 3 fields every 40s, or 4 cycles. Even with cooldown only healing rain gets cast more. So let’s say 3/4 healing for the blast finisher puts it at 1125 average.
Total: 6453

That’s about 13% more healing before we even consider that spamming water blast is about the least utility and DPS you could reasonably achieve in that time. The real takeaway should be that you get around the same healing either way, so it makes more sense to make a healing build that swaps, even if you want to stay in water for some specific fight, there’s no healing build that really favors that play style.

Noctred.6732:

Mammoth.1975:

Guard passives have nothing to do with rng.

Technically, this is true.

Things like purity, the signet of resolve passive, and the virtue of courage passive are not based on RNG because the effect doesn’t happen randomly – it happens exactly every 10 or 40 seconds, respectively.

However, this timer is obfuscated from the player and there’s no reasonable way for the average player to track multiple internal clocks for the entirety of a match to know exactly when these effects are going to go off. The same goes for enemy players who are trying to work around these effects offensively.

So yeah, technically not RNG, but effectively it might as well be.

I agree with suggestion #2 – to have these timers visible on your own and your target’s buff frame.

Back in the beta I read a post where someone claimed the elementalists Signet of Water passive actually proc’d immediately when you first get a condition, then went on cooldown. I haven’t actually tested these effects, but even if it’s not the case, if they were changed to work this way they would become more predictable, and the game could simply use the signet buff icon, or similar icon for purity to indicate that the effect is active and the next condition will be cleansed. That makes the whole thing a lot more predictable, and while it might be a buff to the passives in some cases, it can also be played around like how you would use a weak attack to break a guardian’s aegis before using your cooldowns.

If you couldn’t be pulled during a dodge you would essentially get two opportunities to dodge Binding Blade, first when he throws it, and a second time when he pulls. If you want to avoid the pull after being hit you need to use stability.

ThiBash.5634:

MindlessRuff.1948:

ThiBash.5634:

As for water, how about a ‘healing build’? Sure, it’s not great…but you do have an auto attack that you can use to heal whatever melee is whacking at your target as well. It’s not more useful than attunement swapping, true, but it can be useful at times.

If you have a “healing” build the worst thing you can do is stay in water and auto attack. The 15 trait point in water is an AoE heal and can be traited to cleanse multiple conditions from teammates and yourself. If anything you should be switching away from water so you can get the bonus from swapping TO it as much as possible.

Wheter that is worst or not depends on the situation. The healing from the auto attack would be decent. I’m not saying that people should build around it, but there situations in which it would be a viable tactic.

No, you can literally get more healing by swapping than you could by staying in water. It’s not just Healing Ripple, but also regen from Elemental Attunement, and if you take Lingering Elements then your Soothing Mist is extended outside of water attunement anyways, and all those arcane traits build up into Evasive Arcana for another heal. Plus if you never attune to earth you can’t use Eruption to combo finish your water fields. And that’s all just counting the healing. You also prevent damage through CC, blinds, protection, etc. so if you prioritized healing you would be losing damage mitigation overall.

Healing bunker builds are a very common elementalist build in tournaments, and they don’t stay in water just to spam Water Blast, they would die. And most of them are 30 arcane. Healing is not a sub-optimal build, it’s been explored extensively, but staying in water IS a sub-optimal way to play a healing build.

theonewhoknocks.8641:

RNG stops from there being ridiculously total 100% complete counters.

But this assumes there would be 100% counters without RNG, otherwise you are solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Let’s assume that’s true, how does adding RNG make it better? Instead of being determined by build it’s determined by luck. But shouldn’t the outcome of fights be determined by skill? Isn’t that the real goal for a competitive game? Having RNG just obfuscates the situation. If there are 100% counters that’s a balance issue, but adding RNG will not make the game balanced, it just replaces absolute certainty with blind luck, not with skill.

It’s possible to make games without complete counters. Games where execution takes practice, games where you have to get into your opponent’s head, games where you just don’t have enough time to juggle all the variables, games with incomplete information. You don’t need RNG to have uncertain outcomes, you can use mechanics which players actually have control over.

It’s the projectile you have to dodge, when he throws his sword at you. Once the projectile hits you dodging wont help, but if you dodge the projectile he can’t pull you.

Seetoo.9316:

Kuthos.9623:

Your post makes no sense. If ele’s are not balanced around attument swapping, then it would be perfectly viable to sit around in fire and dps and not get owned in pvp / carried by your group in a dungeon. It HAS to be balanced around attument swapping because they allow you to do it. And very frequently. Therefore they expect you to swap a lot. If they didn’t, they would make us spec into one element and stay in that element the majority of the time.

The fact that there are traits that specifically cater to staying in 1 element proves that ele’s are NOT balanced around swapping. Plain and simple.

Could you please remind me what the optimal staff dps does in dungeons? I’m pretty sure they stay in fire spamming 1 and 2. Any time they swap out of fire, they lose dps. Isn’t that correct?

These examples destroy the claim that “ele’s are balanced around swapping”. You see that statement means “swapping is ALWAYS better than not swapping”. Any example showing otherwise means it is not true.

Except that most trait lines do not favor staying in one attunement. The first thing you need to consider is that you have 70 trait points, so you are invested in a minimum of 3 lines. At this point all 5 point traits that favor one attunement are balanced against 2 other 5 point traits in other attunements. If you invest 15 points you get a trait that only triggers when you have left the attunement and come back, these traits never benefit a build that stays in the same attunement, and again serve the temper the advantages of staying in one attunement.

And then you have attunement cooldowns. But attunement cooldowns only favor staying in attunement for spells where the spell cooldown is lower than the attunement cooldown. If the spell cooldown is longer you can cast the spell, swap attunements and when you come back it’s still on cooldown anyways. So really only some of the 2-3 slot skills even benefit if you are staying in one attunement.

So now you distribute 70 point between these lines, can you possibly take more traits that favor staying in attunement than traits which favor swapping? You’ve got a minimum of two off-attunement 5 point traits and two 15 point traits, so that’s four minor traits that are wasted minimum if you don’t swap, no matter what build.

Now let me ask one more question, if ele is designed to be playable staying in one attunement, what builds stay in water/air?

Do you mean delaying the next attack after the attack that breaks stealth? It wouldn’t make much difference before since attacks don’t break stealth until they have actually landed.

In general bunker builds rely on three things:

Toughness
Healing
Boons

So conditions counter toughness by ignoring it. Poison counters healing, but you need low cooldowns because it will be cleansed repeatedly. And boon stealing/corrupting counters boons like regen, protection, and stability.

So necros are obviously the best here since they turn boons into conditions, but rangers thieves, and engineers can also deliver a fair amount of condition damage with easy access to poison.

The last option, if you are also running a bunker is to knock the opposing bunker off the point and neutralize it. Snares and immobilizes help, and this works better on some points than others.

Sigil of Force is alright, although I prefer bloodlust. Air/Fire have cooldowns that are shared with weapon swap sigils like Battle and Energy, so it makes more sense to take one passive and one active sigil.

The modifier from Force and power are multiplied, so it doesn’t really matter which is applied first. Also I just happened to test earlier today and two sigils of force do not stack.

I would be happy to see sPvP kills count towards the PvE monthly which requires WvWvW kills. I don’t really like WvWvW and I get terrible framerate, but playing PvE and sPvP I can’t complete monthly achievements or work towards Legendary weapons that require WvWvW. I’ve pretty much written of Legendaries completely because WvWvW is not fun for me, but if I could substitute sPvP that would be perfect.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

boozer.7815:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

- Useless Traits
- Broken Traits
- Bugged Traits
- Bugged Skills
- Bugged utilities

Do the other classes have these as well?

Yes. Almost every class suffers from one or more of the things on your list.

except we suffer from ALL of them. I am talking about Thief, Warrior, Guardian and Engineer – the 4 classes that the 2 “balance” devs play and enjoy the most…

Guardian Bug thread
299 posts.

Engineer bug thread
384 posts

Warrior bug thread
120 posts

Thief bug thread
248 posts

Elementalist bug thread
299 posts

Everyone is buggy, warriors perhaps less so, but still quite buggy. Of course not all bugs are equally bad.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

i havent had any points in Arcane EVER. I do just fine

PvE or sPvP?

or WvW?

Rottaran Owain.6789:

EatThisShoe.5136:

If we are to believe the damage formulas derived back in the beta:

Damage = Skill modifier * Weapon Damage * Power / Armor

Then toughness has always scaled poorly at least compared to power. Since Armor is toughness + defense from gear. To double your armor you would need twice as much toughness, as you would need power to double your power.

Isn’t Weapon Damage added to power, not multiplied?

Your ‘attack power’ stat is weapon damage + power. But testing during the beta seemed to indicate that this value wasn’t actually part of the damage formula.

If we are to believe the damage formulas derived back in the beta:

Damage = Skill modifier * Weapon Damage * Power / Armor

Then toughness has always scaled poorly at least compared to power. Since Armor is toughness + defense from gear. To double your armor you would need twice as much toughness, as you would need power to double your power.

There is a trait that causes the shatter effect around the mesmer as well, so you can get 4x shatter. In addition there is a trait and a signet that can recharge all shatters so they could in theory do 2-3 Mind Wracks back to back assuming they can summon enough clones.

Ok, the forum is screwing up on me, and I can’t reload this topic since the first time I read it, so sorry if this has been posted already.

I think this is a fantastic post, and we really need more statistical analysis. However people should be careful about such analysis, as sometimes hard data gives people a sense of certainty, but often thing are much more complicated, and most people are not good at reading data.

On that note, there was one major question about the data that interested me, I only got to read the first graph due to the forum bugging out, but I noticed several sharp turns towards the extreme rank 36+. My suspicion is that this is not in fact a result of a sharp change around rank 30 or so, but rather a smaller sample size. With fewer samples in that data range the difference of only a small number of people could be statistically insignificant, but still cause a notable change in the trend lines. As such I’m curious what the same sizes are at different ranks.

Sorry if this question has already been answered, as I said the forum is bugging out on me, and I am really interested in this topic. Hopefully it will be working when I return to check for replies.

denyitbattle.2609:

I agree with his post somewhat. This is, after all, an MMORPG. It would be very difficult to implement an FPS’s level of twitch aiming skill in a game of this genre. As you said, this game already gets closer to that level of skill on the defensive side of the game than most games in this genre.

Additionally, I have heard several opinions voiced to contrary of “EatMyShoes” point of view. There are several people already off-put by the amount of the game that does require a more twitch-like level of skill as opposed to the more “typical” static, strategic level of PvP gameplay in the genre (something GW1 apparently did the best).

Finally, a couple of my friends that came over from WoW made a point to exclaim how they were initially challenged by the sheer amount of ground targeting precision required by several classes in this game.

While I agree that it would be great to somehow approach that twitch-level of skill offensively in an MMORPG, I think that GW2 already does a better job of it than any other game in the genre. Maybe in the future some additional considerations can be made to help this idea without having to overhaul the entire system, but again, as mouse said, what exactly could be done?

I agree. I intended my post as a fairly general description gameplay, in the context of the original thread. I didn’t draw any conclusions, or propose any solutions, although everyone has their own opinions on the matter, some of which I don’t agree with.

I think everyone views the game through a lens of whatever games they have played prior. Many people compare GW2 to WoW as an MMO, others to LoL. Personally I was playing Team Fortress 2 before, and that has given me a somewhat different outlook on the game. Compared to other MMOs I have played in the past GW2 is a step in the right direction, having skill in defense is an improvement over not having any control defensively like in many past MMOs.

Unfortunately there are some limitations to what GW2 can add offensively without a serious overhaul of the system, which is unlikely to ever happen. There are however skills which do things better than others. I gave the example before of how thieves don’t lose stealth when their hits are blocked or miss due to blind, and while those skills are defensive the mechanic as a whole favors the offense even when they play badly. I think the game could use more skills like the Elementalist’s Phoenix which rewards a well placed GTAE with a triple hit, while a less precise hit rewards only the blast for about 60% of the total damage. GTAE in general is good because not only can you miss offensively, but you can predict and aim better than the in game targetting.

Given the defensive nature of the game however there is only so much you can add offensively without changing the whole game. As such the defensive options should be given more offensive power. The game currently has quite a few block → counter attack skills, but many of them are rather awkward or weak, having real risks in attacking at the wrong time would put pressure on offensive play without lowering their damage. Another aspect is that there are relatively few duration based blocks with meaningful counter effects, Shocking Aura and projectile reflects are the only ones that come to mind, this means multi-hit attacks are subject to less punishment. I think retaliation was meant to punish these attacks, but it has had some balance issues because it is too abundant to be really powerful. Maybe retaliation should stack in intensity rather than duration.

I think Anet was right in wanting offense to have some advantage. Bunker builds aren’t much fun to play against. Since much of the skill in the game is defensive, then the defensive skills need to create offensive opportunities. Some skills do this quite well already, but others fail. Stealth actually achieves this, although it has other issues. Many block counters aren’t very strong, often swing awkwardly at melee range, and aren’t effective against multi-hit attacks. Perhaps some counter attacks could send the original attack back at the attacker so that the bigger the hit countered the stronger the counter attack.

Most of these ideas are off the top of my head, but I think there are opportunities within the current system to improve things and to harness defensive skill into an offense oriented gameplay.

What is your other sigil? Crit sigils and weapon swap sigils share cooldowns, so if you proc’d an air/fire sigil recently the energy sigil wont trigger. Some other crit sigils like earth sigils also have a very short unlisted cooldown.

I think one of the things which frustrates people is that most of the skill in this game is defensive. There’s a big divide between players who can reliably avoid burst combos and those who can’t. This means that almost anybody can pick up a burst build and kill you, and you have to struggle to get better just to stay alive. You can contrast this with FPS games, which often have lower time to kill, but bad players are not very dangerous because they can’t aim. In GW2 there are few skills which really reward high skill with greater damage. In fact some game mechanics really favor low skill attackers, such as blocked and blinded attacks not breaking stealth.

The second issue is that defense is limited. You only get a couple dodges, and whatever defensive skills your profession can add. This has two sub-issues, first even a good player can simply run out of defensive skills and endurance, leaving them an easy kill. Second some professions can retry failed bursts much more often than others, this is part of why shatter mesmers and backstab thieves stand out from 100blades warriors, because bursts come often enough that they can overwhelm defensive cooldowns. Of course the number of defensive skills you can viably pack into a build also varies with profession.

The internal cooldown of GoEP may cause it to only proc conditions on a single target.

Also most of our crit proc traits are barely worth taking. They just aren’t very strong.

I definitely agree about staff reliability. The 2 skills are the only decent damage outside of fire. Air 1 is situational, it’s very good when it’s the right situation, but when it’s not, it sucks, combine that with earth 1 and water 1 both being low damage defensive skills and we become incredibly limited when not in fire.

I think part of the problem is also how many skills don’t deal damage at all, of course this is on top of low damage auto attacks. Geyser, Healing Rain, Frozen Ground, Gust, Windborn Speed all deal zero damage, and they have significant cast times. Unsteady Ground and Static Field deal very low damage. All the time spent casting these CCs is time when we aren’t dealing any damage.

There has to be at least one back-up attunement when fire is on cooldown that can deal damage for more than just one spell. In addition the condition damage on the staff is very sparse, there are only 4 spells total, and Shockwave and Burning Retreat are not really strong condition wise.

Are you running blasting staff? Maybe it’s not increasing the field size to match the increased radius.

It’s definitely bad. There are just too many ways to counter it.

Even though it increases power and precision the attack rate is slower than auto attacking with a staff. The blowout proc only triggers about once every 3 seconds which means even a melee without stability can beat you to death if they can time their dodges. The 1/2/3 skills fire even less often, probably 5 seconds or so. Overall the attack speed is so low that any defensive skills will have a huge impact against it, but the damage dealt is still fairly weak except the occasional chain lightning.

But with such a low attack rate the skill somehow still procs confusion about 3 times per second, making it just one more ridiculous counter. It doesn’t make sense when the skill so clearly has an incredibly slow attack rate.

On a fundamental level Tornado suffers from the same problems as conjures, only worse. The class is so fragile we are very dependent on our active skills for survival, replacing our skills, and even our heal leaves us weak every single time.

I would suggest the following changes:
The launch becomes an activated skill, so we can fire it when it will hit, rather than waiting three seconds just to have enemies out of range, and wait another three seconds. The 1/2/3 skills should also be activated. This gives the player more control over the outcome of Tornado.

Heal and utility skills can be used while in Tornado form. So you have some stuff to do between cooldowns. This could even allow us to CC our targets with signets or cleanse movement impairments.

Attunements could also be usable and swappable to allow the triggering of all related traits. The current 1/2/3 effects could be tied to attunements with an extra effect added.

Confusion only triggers when you actually use a skill, because that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Additionally Tornado could also add vigor, or recharge endurance. Since you can actually dodge while in Tornado form, if it gave you extra endurance that could help give it more survivability.

I think these would be good changes because they all engage the player to actually use the skill well, rather than just popping it and chasing targets mindlessly. In return they give the player a vastly increased number of ways to interact with the Tornado and their opponent.

The only role focus actually excels at is projectile counters. Yes it has an invuln, but as a defensive weapon it burns through its cooldown too quickly when focus fired, especially by melee in PvP.

Only the fire skills are clearly bad, but as a whole the dagger offers better damage, better mobility, and better healing even. Everything the focus adds is very niche. The lack of healing really makes the focus poorly suited to defensive play. If you run a Cleric’s or Shaman’s Amulet for a bunker build you really don’t want to run a focus and have fewer healing skills, in fact D/F has none at all. I’ve actually had better results with a Berserker’s Amulet as you have a better chance of killing or routing your opponent before you run out of cooldowns, but it has no damage or burst options to contribute.

It works okay with condition builds since you can stall while the conditions do their work.

Using staff or Lightning Hammer you can drop a ton of blast finishers in Static Field for 10s of swiftness per blast. With S/D + Arcane Wave + Lightning Hammer I was getting 4 blasts. You do have to stop for a second to cast in the field, but I regularly get a minute of swiftness with my 45% boon duration PvE set when you throw in Elemental attunement and Updraft.

damage varies a lot by pet. Birds (not moas) hit very hard but seem pretty fragile. They also have high precision, and there is a trait to increase critical damage on pets by 30%. I’ve gotten ravens to crit around 3k. 4k is a bit high, but could be possible with the pets share boons trait and might stacking maybe, or if you have no toughness.

As for the fast stomps, it has to be quickness. Rangers have 2s quickness on pet swap that is often used for stomping. It only has to be up when they start the animation, and since it’s short it could easily be expired by the time you see they are fast stomping.

I just tested Elixir R in the mists, and it healed twice per pulse for around 5k, so about 10k per second. Downed state HP is around 50k, so that seems correct as 20%. The skill is 6s long, so assuming perfect timing you could get 6 pulses, and you need at least 2-3 to get up. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter if you can auto attack once before the engie gets his Grappling Line, you are going to need a lot more than one or two hits.

Not all weapons auto attack every 0.5s. An elementalist’s staff for example has auto attack times around 1.3s, and will only hit 2-3k in glass cannon builds.

ATMAvatar.5749:

My major gripe about the greatsword is that AC4 is far more useful (and safer!) untargeted than it is with a target selected. It is such a difference that I instinctively drop target whenever I pull the sword out.

A secondary gripe is that AC3 sometimes shoots you off into a random direction rather than straight ahead, even if you don’t have a target.

Fiery Whirl is a ground target skill, it fires in the direction of your mouse, you probably have fast cast ground targetting on. Not sure what you mean about Fiery Rush.

The main thing I dislike about the greatsword is that you can’t cancel the autoattack animation.

I just gave it a shot on the golem. I was queuing Dragon’s Tooth before Updraft even finished its animation and the golem still had time to start moving, it was pretty clear as he would change his facing after getting up. The window is pretty small though, it might be best to actually try it on a player.

I jut wanted to clarify the function of Arcane Power as I’ve been doing a lot of testing with it, and discussing it over on Guru.

The basics are this:
It does give 5 charges. Problems are caused by how specific spells consume the charges.
It consumes charges when a skill misses or is fired into open space.
It consumes charges from attacks which deal no damage.

My experience with AEs actually runs contrary to what I have seen some people post. I can hit multiple targets, crit them all and consume a single charge. However when consuming the very last charge behavior is sometimes, inconsistently different.

Attacks like Burning Speed actually have many tiny hits triggered along the firewall which consumes all the charges even though they miss.
Churning Earth consumes charges with its 4x cripple pulses even though thy don’t deal damage.
You can actually work around this by activating Arcane Power just before Churning Earth or Burning Speed explodes and you will have charges left over.

It might be intended that missed attacks consume charges, although I would point out that this is not the case for thief venoms. Losing charges on non-damaging attacks is almost certainly a bug.

Other bugs related to Arcane Power:
Water attunement consumes a charge, regardless of traits.
Phoenix consumes two charges, regardless of how many hits.
Water Trident consumes two charges regardless.
Chain Lightning consumes a single charge regardless of bounces.
Spells like Ice Shards and Dragon’s Claw consume three charges, however if you have fewer than three charges remaining then they often do not crit at all.

Other unrelated bugs:
Fiery Greatsword’s 1 skill cannot be cancelled via esc or stow weapons keys. It’s a very long cast time to not be able to be cancelled.

Tornado and Whirlpool proc confusion repeatedly, about twice per second, despite only actually attacking once every 2-3 seconds or so.

shaolinwind.6932:

Answer me this Tornado defenders:

How effective is stability, when you can’t finish enemies, heal downed teammates, or use any utilities or skills except for a random, relatively lowball damage proc once per second and a half?

The answer is: moot. Who cares if you can move freely with stability for 16 seconds when you are really just a ‘KICK ME’ sign you posted on yourself for all to see.

The knockback is sporadic, not reliable. Most good players just pop their own stability and wail on the helpless slow moving idgit that popped tornado.

So please, do enjoy using tornado in all it’s glory. And I’ll continue to pop earth armor and destroy you in the 6 seconds I have of my own stability. :rolleyes:

Would be nice if mist form gave immunity to current conditions/cc for 3 seconds, but not expecting it.

Tornado on the other hand, it FLAT OUT needs to be BUFFED.

You can end Tornado form early and keep the stability boon. It’s still vastly inferior to a ranger’s Rampage as One elite for that use however.

MarzAttakz.9608:

Pretty much what Warmage said. Some “gifted” Ele players were literally doing what thieves do today but using the usual scepter/dagger rotation. D/D wasn’t as popular at the time. They then proceeded to nerf the poopoo out of us and combined with the subsequent nerfs that Mouse mentioned as well as Dragon’s Tooth no longer being a ground-target skill the stage was set.

Dragon’s Tooth was never ground targetted in the betas. Here’s a press beta video prior to BWE1 where the specifically mention Dragon’s Tooth’s targetting around 13:30

Some nerfs I remember:
Lava Font had an instant tick of damage when it finished casting, now it waits 1s, not only did that reduce overall damage about 20%, but the first tick is obviously the easiest to hit, so in practice it was often even worse.

Eruption used to have a very short cast time, and I believe it started its cooldown when you cast it instead of when it erupts, which nearly doubles the cooldown without being effecting by Geomancer’s Alacrity. Prior I had a condition staff build that could use Signet of Earth + Shockwave to immobilize a target through two eruptions (with +30% condition duration and Geomancer’s Alacrity)

Static Field had 4s stun at one point, then 3s, now 2s.

So staff was a lot stronger in the beta, especially damage and condition builds.

Also Glyph of Elemental Harmony was 20s cooldown, though the other heals weren’t as good back then.

Arcane Lightning used to give permanent 3% crit damage for each arcane skill instead of for 10s after use.

Some of the gear in the beta also had more critical damage, Berserker’s Amulet in BWE1 had 30% with no vit for example, and Divinity Runes had 18%, so everything hit harder back then. While damage has gone down I think nerfed gear plus fewer players running 30 fire 30 air builds makes the difference seem even bigger.

Each skill has an individual modifier for how much it benefits from +healing. There isn’t really a way to check other than testing. Some skills like Water Blast which you can spam would just be too strong in defensive +healing builds otherwise.

teviko.6049:

My problem is that A.Net specifically stated that the ability to span gaps like that is an exploit. A Mesmer using blink to do it…exploit, ..ele to do it with Ride the lightning, exploit, an engineer to do it (dunno what kill it was, but saw one do it in Forests of Nifehl…Thieves doing it with sb 5*….these are not supposed to ‘clear gaps’ but they can be used as blink abilities, or faster travel, but not to be used to span distances you can’t make on your own with a jump.

This would indeed be exploiting (or voluntarily bypassing set game mechanics).

Spanning gaps is not an exploit, and I would challenge you to show where Anet specifically stated that it is.

Teleports and shadowsteps have a specific path detection mechanic to determine if your target is accessible. This has been described as a “walkable path” meaning if you could walk from where you are to the destination, then you can teleport. The walkable path CAN allow for walking off ledges. The paths that are not possible are those which require you to jump. Since a player can easily walk off the wall and over to the treb the path is legal. There is also a maximum distance for the path, which is why some teleports that look like they should work don’t.

This is really easy to test. Just stand on a crate, or table or whatever and try to teleport off, then try to teleport back on. It will only work one way. You can walk off the table, but you can’t walk onto it without jumping.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

EatThisShoe.5136:

It’s just dividing by 1+Arcane bonus.

This is basically faster rate of change, like if your water faucet put out 100% more water it would fill a bucket in half the time, not instantly.

That’s what I have in the later part of my first post. I don’t have any trouble understanding how the math works, I was just confused as to if they were doing it this way and why. It’s counter-intuitive IMO to have your 20% recharge traits actually reduce recharge times by 20%, then have this use a different calculation. I would understand using this kind of calculation more if we had some kind of visible metered system other than just time (ex. some other resource like energy/stamina).

I tested the Engineer and the Guardian out in the mists. Apparently this is how it functions for their F key skills, too.

It’s a pretty common practice in MMOs. I don’t think it’s especially chosen for intelligence, but it just scales better. For example if they wanted to later add intelligence on Runes or gear, or new traits, and achieve 70%. The difference between 60% and 70% cooldown reduction starts to get rather large if you are just multiplying. The closer you get to 100% the more the scaling gets out of hand, and thus especially for linear gains like trait stat points it becomes necessary to go all in just so you can spam Static Discharge and Healing Ripple on 2s cooldowns. With the divide by 1+x model you can even go over 100% and the last 90-100% doesn’t make an enormous difference compared to the first 0-10%.

Fire grab has straight up buggy hit detection, it will miss when it really shouldn’t.

In general the ability to fire skills without a target is a good thing for making the game skill based, it gives you more control like being able to hit thieves in stealth, but also allows you to make more mistakes. It gives you the freedom to stack might with fire combos when no one is around or trigger healing from your Signet of Restoration. You can even aim projectiles with mouse look, and sometimes aim breath attacks better with no target than auto targetting.

But Fire Grab is just buggy. Lightning Whip too.

Projectiles as attack type are not the same thing as projectiles as combo finishers. For example Ice Shards is a projectile but not a finisher. Arc Lightning and Flamestrike are not projectiles and cannot be reflected. Vapor Blade is a projectile that can be reflect, but Impale can’t be. Most animations are pretty obvious if they can be reflected, they are the same skills that can be blocked by pets and so forth.

Also be sure you are mistaking Retaliation which is a damage shield boon that has nothing to do with projectile reflection.

It’s just dividing by 1+Arcane bonus.

This is basically faster rate of change, like if your water faucet put out 100% more water it would fill a bucket in half the time, not instantly.

The elementalist heavily favors attunement swapping, but the advantages are a lot less clear cut that the advantages of making “always DPSing in fire” build.

As an example a full DPS build will often invest in fire and air, well if you don’t swap attunements you aren’t benefitting from Static Discharge and Sunspot at all. Also I’ve heard players say that they have both 5% more damage on burning targets traits, but burning doesn’t go away when you swap attunements, so you can apply that 10% damage to big hits in other attunements, and the fire line even adds up to 30% longer duration to give you more time to benefit while in other attunements. Arcane Fury also brings a lot of benefit if you are swapping often. While there are traits that only work while in one attunement, other traits only work when you change attunements. And many weapons have powerful cross attunement combos.

Even cooldown reduction traits must be judged relative to your attunement cooldowns. If you lower a cooldown that is still equal or longer than the cooldown of the attunement then you can easily swap attunements after hitting that skill and come back without any loss of efficiency. So while Pyromancer’s Alacrity might let you spam Lava Font more while staying in fire, you could easily swap away and come back before Meteor Shower comes off cooldown.

Take a S/D build with Ember’s Might, Internal Fire, and Pyromancer’s Puissance. But also with Arcane Fury, Bolt to the Heart, and Aeromancer’s Alacrity. Now you might start in fire and unload your blasts into your fire field, pop Fire Grab if it’s up etc. Now you have all these might stacks, is the best move to just stick to Flamestrike and Dragon’s Tooth until everything comes off cooldown? Instead try attuning to earth, you might even fit an Earthquake into your fire field, then hit Churning Earth and actually make that fat stack of might from your combos and puissance apply to heavy hitting skill. And right before it goes off you switch to Air and gain fury when Churning Earth lands, plus you have instant access to Lightning Strike, and static discharge, also with fury and might applied. And when fire comes off cooldown you get sunspot again too.

Or you could just get 10% more damage in fire and keep your might stacks constant, but you wont apply them to as many heavy hitting skills in the same amount of time.

It can depend a lot on weapon choice. Staff has much less damage in other attunements, so while you can gain tons of benefit from swapping it will be less in the form of DPS. However many people think that healing on the staff is weak if you don’t spec for it, which is not accurate. A huge chunk of healing potential comes from blast finishers which don’t even scale well with +healing. All healing in this game, and on this class comes from stacking many effects together, For example using Eruption + Arcane Wave + Evasive Arcana to triple combo finish a Geyser while also triggering Cleansing wave from evasive Arcana, and regen from Elemental attunement. And if you happen to invest in water traits it’s not simply the +healing that increases your healing power, it’s the ability to throw in Healing Ripple and Soothing Mist extended by Lingering Attunements on top of that combo. Even with zero +healing it’s possible to heal around 6k with a 30 Arcane build, and you are dealing damage with Eruption and Arcane Wave too. And that combo is actually fairly quick other than the cast time of Eruption, so you can really fit that into a quick 2s swap to water then swap out again.

Overall it’s easy for people to see 10% more damage in fire and think that means they have to stay in fire to get maximum DPS. But if you start off swapping attunements then you learn all kinds of tricks and combos and get so much more out of the class. If you keep trying to max DPS in fire you don’t learn nearly as much about attunements that you don’t use.

First, add an option in the control menu to center the mouse either when entering or exiting mouse look. This could help a lot with the problem many players have described of losing track of their mouse in combat. It should be optional, so players can decide for themselves if they like it, or possibly even if they prefer to center upon activating mouselook or instead when releasing it.

Second: Allow ground target spells to target through all UI windows. Since skills can be fired via hotkey without clicking the window, you should be able to target the ground behind these UI elements.

The way it currently works activating a GTAE when the mouse is over a UI window causes it to activate directly on top of the player. This can be worse than not firing at all, especially with teleport skills, clipping the edge of the target window can basically cause the spell to fail and go on cooldown.

Allowing targetting through windows would increase the usable space on the screen and would especially benefit players playing at lower resolutions where the UI takes up more of the screen.

I think these two changes would improve the polish and ease of transitioning between GTAoE and mouse look which is a huge part of combat in this game.

They haven’t said how you pay for the servers officially yet. It is speculated that it will work via gems. Gems would make sense in many ways, it offers players a way to pay either real money, or in game money, and PvP only players can earn gems via paid tournaments.

Happened to me a couple times, different maps. I think it tended to happen towards the end of the match as the first two times I was close enough to just wait for the map change, but that could have been a coincidence.

If the point is on the ship no one would ever go underwater to fight. The point of the map is supposed to be to have underwater combat in a sPvP map. The problem is that no one wants to fight under water when you have 5 sharks eating you, even if they are neutral whoever aggroes more sharks will want to run to shore to reset. Plus they block vision which is already a problem underwater. They should just remove the sharks, then people might actually try to fight underwater.

I’m not sure how anyone can feel this way about the whip now in it’s current form. The thing can hit multiple targets now and doesn’t miss all the time (like before), it’s probably the best auto-attack in the D/D arsenal.
/boggle

Lightning Whip still misses a ton, they didn’t fix it at all, just added the multiple target aspect.

Lightning Whip already out damaged Dragon’s Claw before this change. Anybody who thought it did poor damage is dead wrong, it is our strongest auto attack across all weapons, at least for power builds. But the hit detection is still broken, which really seemed more important to me.

They both work fine for me. Arc Lightning is a 3 second channel that hits 10 times dealing progressively more damage per tick, so if you get interrupted, break line of sight, or start casting another spell it will cancel and you will miss a lot of the total damage. Maybe you are inadvertently interrupting the spell. There is also a bug with the animation where it never ends.

Lightning Strike is instant cast and can be cast during other spells, so you can just spam it off cooldown as long as you can hit your target.