Guild Wars 2

Honestly? At this point, I hope they’d actually continue with the nerfs until they literally smash the class through the ground to the point where not a single “pro” player would ever consider using it.

It would be a pretty crucial lesson to the company, if nothing else.

I actually found attunement swapping when wielding a conjured weapon rather useful, and don’t really know if I want to lose, say, the ability to proc protection by switching to earth while wielding lightning hammer.

Forums are bugging out for me, so I can’t quote for some reason.

The 3.4k crits were using almost identical setups as the warrior (30 points in fire and air, all traits damage, force sigil, berserker amulet). It’s possible to crit for the first five ticks of whirlpool by also popping arcane power, although that’s really stretching it on survivability – given elementalist base HP values, any elementalist built that way is probably dead the moment whirlpool ends.

I left out crit damage armor sigils in both builds, although it would push up the damage of 100B as well as whirlpool. Also, it’s possible that the elementalist is using traits that increase damage on certain conditions (one that pops to mind is the air trait that increases damage by 20% on opponents with less than 25% HP), in which case the whirlpool won’t deal damage quickly enough to prevent escape.

Also, Elementalists have no traits or skills that grant quickness on any scale, so the only way to get quickness is to use a sigil and hope that it procs. Major sigil is only 3s with a long icd, though, so…

(Also, someple please correct me if I’m wrong, but iirc you can still attack downed opponents underwater with any skill, not just whirlpool.)

Pyles.5301:

Emerald: Couple of items missing in your features and benefits breakdown.

It’s probably best to continue the discussion with a somewhat more equal environment, so here’s a bunch of damage tests on heavy golems:

100 Blades
(Setup: berserker amulet, only power on armor, force sigil, frenzy and self might buff, full power+crit damage traits, +% damage greatsword trait):
Stacked up to about 14-16k on heavy golem (with crits) in 1.5 seconds.
Without Frenzy, this comes out to about 4k per second.

Whirlpool
(Setup: berserker amulet, only power on armor, force sigil, full power+crit damage traits, +% damage attunement trait, +% damage on burning trait):
Consistently ticked at 1 hit per second on heavy golem (I don’t know how you’re getting multiple ticks, but eh).
Damage was 3.4k per critical hit, 1.4-something without.

Seems that with everything else equal, 100B still did more damage per second than whirlpool when everything else was equal. Certainly, whirlpool lasts for 15 seconds, but obviously you can’t expect it to deal 15k over 15s when using a full glass cannon build when the user is fully vulnerable for its duration – that’s a surefire, instant way to make a elite skill completely useless as you are then able to stand in whirlpool and kill the elementalist while she’s completely helpless and skill-locked.

So, let’s correct that assessment a bit:

100B
- Does ~12-16k assuming all 8 attacks hit.
- Max targets = 3
- Frontal cone damage.
- Damage ends on movement from warrior including turning.
- Can be avoided with movement.
- If it downs someone futher actions are required to kill them.
- Is a number two skill on a weapon
- Has a eight second cooldown

Whirpool:
- Is a 360 degree pbAOE
- Hits all targets in range
- Hits exactly once per second.
- Caster is not rooted in place, but is vulnerable until skill ends or is cancelled.
- Endurance (dodge) or a movement or avoidance skill is required to avoid damage.
- See above for damage. Does not, in fact, outdamage 100B per second on equal terms. Check for vulnerability stacks, toughness differences, and other factors.
- If this downs someone do nothing and they are dead from the continuing damage.
- Is an elite skill, which means it should be on the same par as, you know, the actual elite skills (tome of courage, thieves guild, and the likes). If it’s equal to a single 2 skill on a weapon, something is wrong with the balance of the skill
- Has a 180 second cooldown. This is 22.5x that of 100B

Pyles.5301:

Others: I have seen people quote numbers about 100blades of 20k etc in above posts and saying its equivalent. If 100b pulled you in and dealt more damage i would have sympathy. As it stand 100b is significantly easier to avoid and deals less damage per hit and less total damage.

Let’s put the comparison into a bit of perspective. At the moment, 100b does all of the following (we’ll forget frenzy for a moment):

• Completes its payload in three seconds.
• Deals about 30k damage payload with a full damage build. Within a span of three seconds, this is enough to one-shot pretty much any character.
• Can be dodged.
• Has no inherit CC component.
• Leaves its user vulnerable for a 3 second duration.
• Has a 8 second cooldown.

Whirlpool does all of the following:

• Completes its payload over 15 seconds.
• Deals about 30k damage over the course of 4-6 seconds.
• Can be dodged. You will have to out-range it during its duration.
• Has a “pulling in” CC component.
• Leaves its user vulnerable for its full 15 second duration.
• Has a 180 second cooldown.

Now, let’s consider what would happen if whirlpool was reduced to, say, only deal 2k damage per hit. Against a character with no other defenses but 21k health, the whirlpool will take a full 10 seconds to kill him. During the whirlpool’s duration, all of an elementalist’s skills are disabled (this includes utility skills, etc.), which means as a high defense, “actually has VIT” character, it is now in your best interest to park yourself right in the middle of whirlpool to get a free kill on the elementalist. This changes whirlpool from a threat into a suicidal elite skill that will almost always get the elementalist killed.

This is never the case with a 100B warrior. Almost no one will choose to stand in the middle of 100B and try to DPS the warrior during the 3 second (usually less!) flurry, and if the warrior happens to use 100B again, the same thing will happen – everyone GTFO’s out of the range. The comparison also takes into account the fact that 100B delivers its payload much quicker (especially with frenzy) and deals more damage per tick with good gear, and has a 8 second cooldown instead of, you know, an elite’s 180.

Whirlpool operates under a similar principle. It’s CC is a soft control, which means you can dodge and use skills to escape its effective range and play avoidance with the elementalist for at least the first 10 seconds of the skill. If the CC is not present, then whirlpool simply becomes a suicidal skill when any ranged attackers are present. Even with the CC, you don’t need stun breaks or invulnerability skills to escape – just dodge twice and you should be out of its range. Avoid elementalist until spell wears off.

EDIT: Also, for comparison purposes, whirlpool is an elite skill. This means it’s on the same level as Moa Transform, Time Warp, Thieve’s Guild, Tome of Courage, Battle Standard, and the likes.

Did some testing on golems:

• Each hit of the storm counts as a separate hit (and thus will eat one “proc” of arcane power). This seems to happen regardless of whether the hit actually connected with a target or not, as arcane power expired after exactly five bolts from lightning storm even though three of them missed the golem altogether.
• If a hit of the storm consumed a charge of arcane power, it will proc elemental surge. Thus, if you pop arcane power and then earth arcane storm, the first five ticks of the tornado will each cause immobilize to all targets hit.

I love elementalist. When I started with the class, the challenge (PvE) was quite surprising; I tried a bunch of daring things and died quite a few times, but each time the class grew more and more on me. Trying to play a warrior now; have a lot of trouble getting her past the early levels because it feels so much like grinding levels in Lineage 2.

I’m just starting to really learn the class in PvP though. It’s been a difficult road so far, but I would not have it any other way.

Whirlpool is extremely good, added on top of a very strong weapon set that is the trident. It makes elementalists a significant threat when underwater.

It is a balanced skill, though. Think of it as a underwater 100B with a three-minute CD instead of eight seconds. For the entire duration that it is active, the elementalist cannot access any other skills, survival or otherwise. If you’re melee only, just out-range it, wait for a bit, and you won’t have to worry about the skill again.

tufy.7859:

Respectfully, I disagree. A staff (WvW) or Scepter/Dagger (sPvP) elementalist with Lightning Hammer as main weapon achieves similar flexibility as standard weapon swapping classes. The only things you have to be careful about here is that S/D uses a bit more condition damage, whereas Hammer uses pure power and that you’ll need more toughness and vitality in order to survive close range intact.

That’s fair. I admit to not being that good at PvP, so I tend to use a lot of more established builds. Since I haven’t seen very many people (any, really – videos or experience) use conjured hammer in PvP, my perspectives may be colored by that.

tufy.7859:

If you want a traditional caster, staff and scepter/focus or scepter/dagger combos offer plenty of choice for everyone without turning elementalist into something that it’s not ment to be.

I do disagree on “turning elementalist into something it’s not meant to be”, though.

In BWE, elementalists actually did considerably higher damage than they do now, which indicated to me that the original design that ANet had for elementalist did include them as a high damage class at first. The damage was removed as a function of balance and not because it was not intended to be a part of the class.

The suggestion was also not for my benefit; I’ve always saw the elementalist as a strong class, and I prefer to see any deaths in PvP as room for improvement rather than a fault with the class. However, the fact of the matter is that the elementalist is one of the most complained about class in both this forum and GW2GURU, which was what prompted me to make this suggestion in the first place. Personally, I feel that the class would be much better balanced if it had an isolated option for the newer/casual players (the “average joes” if you well) with the majority of the class mechanics remaining the same; that way, you keep the people that want traditional mages happy while not influencing tournament play, getting rid of most of the complaints on the elementalist forum as a side benefit.

EDIT:

tufy.7859:

The problem is, the only “hard” part about elementalist is learning to swap attunements. If you take that away with your greatsword, people will simply stick to that one weapon and complain how they have no versatility in choice. Worse yet, that kind of weapon, given its ease of use, would likely become synonimous with “noob gear” and a prime target of PvP fights, further fueling tear generation. All in all, it is – in my honest opinion – a bad idea.

I do have to respectively disagree with this, as well (not the swap attunements part, but the “noob gear” part).

The distinguished between “noob gear” and “non-noob gear” is not something new or novel – it already exists on a lot of classes. Warriors, for instance, has the very famous 100B build, thieves with the heartseeker spams, engineers with grenade spam, and rangers with the shortbow 1-spam builds. Sure, you have a lot of higher-up players trying to dissuade newer players from playing these, but it still stands that an “average joe” player could run one of these builds and still be effective in hot-join games.

And I’m not even proposing a button mashing GS weapon – merely one that trades versatility for the same damage that you would see in BWE2. The GS could still have some complexity to it, and as long as the perceived complexity is manageable at a slightly more casual level, people would be satisfied with it. It would at least keep starting elementalists in the class rather than dissuade them from it (and eventually, some of these same elementalists may start watching videos of TP or something and decide to push themselves to improve with the other weapons, resulting in a greater pool of skilled Ele players).

For the people that stick with the GS – well, there are quite a few elementalists that switch to thief and 2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2 even right now. Given that there’s currently no drama in the thieves forum about this, I don’t think it would be a significant problem.

Also, I’m not saying your observations are baseless assumptions. It’s more that the attack about short-sighted views that irked me (not that it’s not true as I admit I’m not a skilled elementalist by any means, but still).

tom.7468:

why not just give them railgun and peacemaker gatling gun aswell they should both do 100k dmg per shot and grant permanent shield to projectiles!

I’m all for the use of sarcasm, but it should at least tie back to the opinion that is actually mentioned in the thread. Otherwise, it would be like replying to “I like cake,” with “it’s totally not raining outside right now. You’re soooo right.”

tufy.7859:

That said, I believe the OP’s idea isn’t well thought out. You cannot have a training weapon, because you would be pidgeonholing your players into a certain playstyle. Now, if you want to retain uniqueness across the board, a player coming from that weapon to any other would essentially have to relearn the entire class again, thereby gaining nothing. I would also like to say that elementalist isn’t all that hard to start with – at low levels, even taking a hit or three, you won’t instantly get downed – it is therefore imperative, that players learn to swap attunements early, lest they be killed a lot come higher levels, further fueling the perception of the “hard to play profession”.

I also believe that the OP has a short-sighted view of the elementalist arsenal. Consider engineer, which likewise can’t swap weapons and actually has a smaller assortment of possible weapon types, yet may equip a number of utility skills that expand this arsenal. Elementalist has a similar mechanic in summoned weapons that interestingly enough don’t seem very popular, though builds are starting to emerge centered around them. I believe that in time, people will realize it was their perceptions and mostly preconceptions that were limiting them, not the class itself.

Please don’t make completely baseless assumptions about what I can and cannot perceive about my class.

There are already builds that are emerging based on lightning hammer; a single look on GW2GURU makes this pretty clear. Many of us know that frost bow is powerful in dungeons, and the main reason why there hasn’t been as much support for the greatsword is simply because it has a long cooldown as an elite skill. All of this, however, is in PvE only simply because the conjured weapons are not viable in a PvP setting (the flaming greatsword is very nice in WvW because of its range, but the elemental is far superior in sPvP/tPvP). With them taking up a utility slot, completing replacing the weapon skills, disappear on drop, and generally having limited versatility, it is not difficult to see why you would not expect the same quality result from, say, lightning hammer compared to having mist form or arcane blast on the same slot.

I’m mainly talking about sPvP and tPvP.

I don’t expect a training weapon scenario to play out perfectly; I added it as an afterthought because while it would be nice to have, a true training weapon with BWE1/BWE2 damage skills will be impossible to design and balance. The idea of a easier, more traditional mage-like weapon is the main point of the GS, though – while individuals may have their own opinions about the class, a lot of elementalist complaints are about how they need to work much harder than most other classes to get quality results. You may believe that the class’s skill floor is not actually that high in structured PvP settings, but the sheer number of complaints in the forum would suggest otherwise.

On the other hand, “improving” the performance of the elementalist – whether it’s damage buffs or otherwise – will have ripple effects and impact some of the top-level tPvP players out there, where elementalists are viewed as a very strong class. Sure, it’s a problem if a class is adequately difficult that most of its players cannot even play at an acceptable level with the class, but it’s also a problem if a class is way too good at the top skill levels.

The GS is intended to be a compromise. By adding a separate 2H weapon with a different set of skills, you can adjust that weapon so that it’s easy to use, high damaging, and not broken in the hands of a top player (translating roughly to better damage at the cost of versatility). Thus, the masses will be satisfied by having a weapon that performs up to their views while the metagame for the “elite” players would not change.

The conjured weapons as they are right now would not change a thing in PvP precisely because they are not quite viable choices in (not WvW) PvP. Feel free to prove me wrong on this point if you disagree.

Turbo Whale.1738:

Umm… what would be the point of playing an Elementalist like this? The whole idea behind the Elementalist is having a crap ton of versatility.

Because it addresses one of the main reasons people are complaining about Elementalist in PvP, without overstepping the balance concerns from the “elite” players.

Essentially, it allows people to play as a blasty mage that they’ve been used to in other games, while keeping the “blasty mage” quarantined to a single weapon. The weapon can’t interact with the existing weapons due to a lack of weapon swapping, so there would be no problems in competitive play.

madatom.5218:

see i would rather have the conjured weapons be useful for any playstyle, and the elementalist by nature is and always will be a niche high performance demanding class

also at the end of the day, people still min/max and if the weapon is amazingly powerful then even the elites will use it, where if it was not then a considerable amount of casual gamers will opt out of it

Changing conjured weapons is an alternative. The only problem I see with the idea is that elementalists are treading a very fine line of balance at the moment – buffing (or even changing) a currently existing feature like conjured weapons, especially in the manner that you are describing, can lead to some very shaky

Min/maxing of a single weapon is very easy to fix. Take a look at the warrior greatsword – very useful for newer players, but almost never used by the higher-up tPvP teams. Since it’s a single weapon that is separate from the others, it would be very easy to tweak the skills on that weapon to fit a easy to use, high damage, but very low breaking potential archetype, especially with the lack of weapon swapping.

(I’m not suggesting that it will be 100B on a mage class or anything like that, of course.)

echarizma.6327:

GS to ele for balance? OMG! A caster in light armor, prefer CC and range combat.

You’re looking too much at the weapon and not at the idea itself. I could replace “greatsword” with “two-handed doll” or “longbow” or “giant fish on a stick” and it wouldn’t change a thing about the idea.

So, all of the argument back-and-forth between the “elites” and the “casuals” seem to address the idea of buffing and nerfing as an absolute – the idea of “buffing elementalists” is generalized to impact all levels of play for a class, while “nerfing other classes” are mistaken as nerfing all aspects of those classes. The idea is that any nerfs or buffs will ripple through all levels of skill and cause imbalances at the higher echelons of the game, somewhat like the insane builds that appeared at the BWE periods.

The only question that I ask is: why does balancing have to be that extreme? Many of us have already identified one of the core problems of the class, which is the very high minimum skill required to perform adequately with the class. In a nutshell:

• Elementalists are currently balanced at high skill levels and very weak at lower (average) skill levels.
• Numerical benefits and straight buffs will make the class balanced at lower (average) skill levels but broken at higher skill levels.

Thus, I would like to propose an alternate idea to balance the two levels of gameplay: adding a new weapon – the Greatsword – to the class.

The greatsword, for elementalists, will basically serve as a newbie-friendly, higher damage weapon with considerably lower versatility than any of the other weapons. Most of the skills on the weapon will deal damage close to BWE1-BWE2 levels, although the weapon will have much lower versatility and a lot of the abilities will become very similar to each other (possibly even with shared cooldowns to ensure the concept of “lower versatility” is enforced). The weapon will only have a single, long-cd fire combo field and fewer AoEs, would have mostly targeted condition infliction, and would have very low variety overall in favor of straightforward damage and a few elements of control, making it an less desirable weapon for upper echelons of play.

The idea for the greatsword is for it to be a weapon that is more friendly to newer players. A player using the GS can rack up competitive amounts of damage with relative ease compared to the other weapons, but would be restricted in the number of tricks that he has at his disposal (shared cooldowns, cloned skills between attunements, etc.). Because an elementalist does not have weapon swapping, this would allow the elementalist to be a bit more newbie friendly than it currently is without heavily impacting the “elite” players.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: To add to this, it would be nice if the greatsword could somewhat be a “learning weapon” of sorts to get players used to their traits, managing boons and cooldowns, and overall understanding the mechanics of the class. I do not know how this would be done or if this is possible, but it would get more players interested in a complex class like an elementalist without pushing them all away due to the initial barrier of entry.

I don’t understand how. The water attunement alone is enough to make underwater combat one of the elementalist’s strong points (given that you’ve spent the time to upgrade your trident, of course).

I disagree with this thread. Elementalists are good, but every other class can use the Brose-Nigel Sync Combo trick to beat elementalists, with thieves being the best at this tactic because of their high Bose-Einstein Statistic Potential Coefficients. Elementalists, however, utilize this tactic very ineffectively because they have a combo of low BESPC and low THAC0 values, which makes their Sub-Hydromaintainence levels approach a nadir and putting them at the lowest of all classes.

Also, elementalists are worse because their icon is a fireball thing. This defies feng-shui and makes them automatically a bad charcter. This is common knowledge and I don’t need to give a single example to support this, since anyone who disagrees simply does not have adequate Hym-Nolotin Concentrates to increase the truthiness of their arguments by enough to reach limit break.

For what I actually think, though, I believe that necros and eles need quite a bit of help in PvP. I also believe that, for my class at least, buffing elementalists is a dangerous maneuver that could easily render the top 1% of its players absolutely overpowered, and there needs to be a lot more thought put into this than just listening to what the community is demanding at the moment. I extend that concern over to necromancers; it would be quite terrible if there was a blanket buff to multiple facets of a necro’s gameplay to appease everyone in the community, and then three years down the line discover that in the hands of an adequately skilled player, some currently unforeseen chain caused the entire class to complete dominate the pvp scene. The backlash from then nerfing necros back to their original level would be absolutely insane.

Mathemagician.7314:

Snipped for length.

Do you know the guild “Strictly Business”? They run a necromancer in structured tPvP against other high-level PvP teams, and one of their members actually claim that necromancer, when played right, is one of the best PvP classes in the game in team support play, with an explicit example of a necromancer helping to remove a guardian bunker in one of his PvP videos. I don’t claim to speak for the guild or anything, but what do you think would be your reply if you were to ask DarkAngelos what he thought about necro pvp? That your experience trumps his, that necro is entirely hopeless, and that he plays the class in high-level tPvP because he just wants to?

Have you played an elementalist in sPvP or tPvP? If there’s a large outcry that necromancers are boned in any form of PvP outside of WvW, the outcry for elementalists is even louder, and spans across way more than just the official forums. What you said about burst metas? Not having the tools to quickly do damage? Very poor in melee? A lot of that describes elementalists just as well as they do necros, given how their skills have fractions of the damage of other classes and have been severely nerfed to the point that many – and I repeat MANY – people consider them free kills in sPvP. Then, you watch streams from Phantaram or Sad Fayce; none of them directly bursts down their opponents in 10 seconds or does any of this “burst metagame” at all. Each and every one of them are focused heavily on support – controlling opponents with aoe fields, spamming conditions like chill, keeping alive under focus, rezzing in mist form, and using field combos to build a number of conditions and boons at once. And all of them are central to the gameplay of their team, playing a class that is considered by many to be the bottom of the barrel.

I’ve played elementalist for quite a while; started for a bit in the beta weekends, clocked in at over 150 hours of playtime, and I don’t consider myself anywhere near the skill level of these people. I get rolled in PvP, sure, but every time this happens I remind myself that it may not be the class at fault and that it might just be me not playing the class correctly. The fact of the matter is simple: you and Tony could each claim that you are the better necro guru for hours and get absolutely nowhere. Stating that you have played for XXX hours on the class (or even correcting perceived mistakes) does not make you any more of an absolute authority on your class or on the tPvP meta than my hours played on the elementalist does for me, or what Tony’s claims does for him. I will not dare say that I know more about necros than you do given that the class is my alt, but hey – I know a necro in a top-end guild that tPvPs and disagrees with you in the same way that I know elementalists in top-end guilds that disagrees with the many BWE1 elementalists that are proclaiming that elementalists now suck in PvP. What does that say about opinions?

For the crux of the actual argument itself, nothing in the post that you quoted was ever directed at you specifically. Do you agree that there are people that have played the game since BWE1 and still cannot play it at max potential? Do you agree that these people will very often go on the forums and make their opinions known on a very limited base? Do you agree that people will often jump on the bandwagon and blow an opinion out beyond proportion just because that’s human nature? The original question that I quoted was “do you think a single person would know better than hundreds of people on the necro forums,” to which the answer was an unanimous YES. I’m sure you are a good necro player and that you have valid concerns about PvP, and I even agree with you on it on a personal level; that does not change the fact that there is a mob mentality to any class, and that a single person can know and play a class better than most of the people playing that class. As for the rest, there are also good players that disagree with you, and I think it would be absolutely pompous for someone else (not you) to dismiss them just because a bunch of people in the forums thinks otherwise.

Zaalg.3217:

Next, underwater combat needs a major damage buff. Seriously…it’s pathetic.

I don’t know about that. The water attunement by itself is enough to make underwater combat one of the elementalist’s strong points.

[Citation Needed]

titaniumm.2983:

we can’t be a glass cannon cause our damage suck, we can’t be a tank for obviusly reason, we are only usefull as a support..i don’t think ele was thought to be a support class here..so Probably Anet do something wrong on this class…

An exceptionally good elementalist can bunker.

Bananaheli.8501:

Agree with you on that big dps isnt the most important thing, but it is hard not to be abit demotivated when a guarding deals more dps that you.

Don’t let that shield icon fool you: guardians out-dps a lot of classes. In fact, a good portion of the time, a non-scholar class will out-dps a scholar class if both are built around the same way. Mesmers, necromancers, and elementalists all have either low damage or low survivability (or both!) depending on how they spec, and trying to compare dps against plate classes is kinda an exercise in futility at most levels.

I won’t disagree with you on the necro damage evaluation, but I will point out that mad deeps isn’t the only metric that a class should be judged by. Warriors and guardians are, at the moment, some of the best classes to play in PvE in general not just because they can dish out a lot of damage, but also because – in most builds – both classes have a lot of innate defense and/or defensive options so that they can come out of the situation alive.

Conditionmancers are currently strong on survival and control/support in PvE. You will be disappointed if you’re comparing yourself against a warrior or guardian (or if you are not well-built and compare youself against a specialized PvE spec). However, mobs simply do not kill you; you have tons of options to survive and continue the bleed assault. In a dungeon party, light and dark are both very excellent combo fields, and the wells themselves contribute quite a bit to the party. Plus, you’re not going to go down nearly as fast as a standard glass cannon thief or elementalist build in the hands of a normal player.

My opinions are that while necros aren’t going to roflstomp things as much as the melee classes do, they – very much like mesmers – are very excellent in survival.

(I usually find the GW2guru forums more helpful than the official ones for finding build advice and leveling advice, also).

Nixxez.8671:

And you are the only person that does know how to play it. Eh.
How are the chances of you being right and everyone else wrong compared to everyone else being right and you being a blabbermouth? Marginal.

It’s pretty high, actually. A good exercise is to go into the elementalist forums and note how many complaint threads there are about how the class is not viable for PvP. Then, go and ask Phantaram about what he thinks of his class. You’ll find that the answers you get are very different simply because someone like Phantaram knows the ins and outs of his class, while most players will just know the class at a relatively basic level.

It’s a general rule that most of the players in a given class is probably not using it close to its full potential. For a very easy class like warrior and thief this is okay, as the classes have many simple builds with simple mechanisms, and they would still perform competently and will mostly only get rolled by a much more skilled player. For a difficult class like necro or elem, the fact that they do not work very well at “average joe” skill levels gets magnified on the forums, and you end up with tons of complaints.

Brexin.7684:

which imo is pretty stupid. Ele will be the lowest played class if they dont get buffed.

It’s not, at all. If your class is not balanced at higher skill levels and if elementalist rolls through most other classes in 1v4 when the elementalist player and his opponents are all exceptional, you have a problem at end-game PvP.

The only thing that needs fixing imo is an additional option for a more standard player, maybe in the form of a greatsword weapon option with less versatility/aoe pressure and more damage, so that elementalist doesn’t become a 1% playerbase PvP class (+bug fixes of course). A nerf or buff without the prerequisite foresight would ripple through all skill levels and make the class totally overpowered at high-end PvP.

Basically, in beta tests, elementalists were relatively balanced for most of the player-base as a high damage class. A few extremely good players took this and proved that with exceptional skill, the beta test elementalists were downright broken compared to other classes, and to balance for these players, ANet nerfed elementalists to a point where the top players were only doing well with them (instead of dominating 1v3+), with the consequence that the class is extremely inaccessible to most of the player base.

I realized that I didn’t give numbers to my previous assessment, so guess my opinion would be 2 for PvE/WvW and 3 for s/tPvP. The three of course is not in favor of numerical buffs as much as a lower versatility, higher damage, and simpler to control alternative for most players who are still learning the class. This would indirectly make PvE a bit easier with this weapon as well, but that’s not a problem.

For kicks, this weapon should also be the greatsword, and should have BWE2-era damage.

I actually like where Elementalists are in both PvE and WvW. WvW is obvious, of course, but we’re workable in PvE while requiring a considerable amount of skill to execute correctly, and water/fire are both very desirable combo fields (alongside the necro’s dark) and makes us really good in a group that knows to combo blast finishers in a healing rain/whirl finishers in ice field. It makes soloing fun, too, rather than “walk up, press 2, HUUUUNDRED BLAAAAADES.”

For PvP, I think that elementalists are balanced way too much towards the maximum end of the skill spectrum in group play. Granted, I’m not close to being there yet, but from the videos and streams of Phara, AC Powers, and Sad Face I’ve deduced that elementalists actually perform quite well in very high-skill, organized, pre-made team play. In fact, many of the nerfs that we saw from BWE1 to now are the indirect result of similar extraordinary players taking the high-damage AoE elem archetypes of beta test GW2 and breaking each and every one of them three ways to next Friday.

The problem that this causes is pretty obvious; the extremely skilled players are a small minority in the game, while most of the game are filled with players of a vastly varying spectrum of skill. While it’s okay to make a class more difficult to play than the others, in no game should any class require that level of gameplay especially given how many of your players will never be in one of those top pvp guilds. The elementalist imo needs a new weapon set with lower versatility (like making some skills relative clones of each other, having fewer aoes and aoe controls, while making this weapon somewhat easier to use in PvP) in exchange for more damage and generally easier control. This makes elementalist skill more of a progression – newer players would still be able to use the class and learn by playing and learning slowly from playing PvP instead of being instarolled and giving up on the class, while the top-end players won’t use this weapon to steamroll because they recognize that it’s a less versatile and worse weapon overall at their skill level.

There will, of course, be elems that stick to this learning weapon, but that’s just like warriors deciding to stick with a 100b build in PvP – its less effective when played well and that player should not be a threat to more advanced players, higher damage on weapon or not.

This (and appropriately balancing this new weapon to lower skill levels), I think, will address most of the elem PvP issues of “the class needs a buff, but we can’t buff them because it will make people like Phantaram a raid boss in PvP.”

The Boz.2038:

It’s not hard to realize how that is not the problem here. In the other class forums, if someone says “I think this class is UP and broken and unplayable”, a maximum of 40% of the posts will agree witht he OP, and at least half of those will be the OP bumping his topic and defending his argument.

You have not visited the elementalist forums =p. The sheer amount of complaining on that class is so severe that practically the entire first page is filled with them, and the same ends up happening for a lot of the other GW2 forums as well (GW2guru, for instance), even those where necro complaints are relatively tame.

Honestly, though, I’ve seen people in the necro threads posting “grass is greener” posts about the elementalist that are not even remotely true (there was a post about how elems are good nukers in PvP that pretty much floored me), many of whom have claimed to “play an elementalist”; consequently, I’ve seen people that main elementalists post similar things about necros that sometimes showed blatant lack of knowledge of the class, while claiming that “switching to necros made my soloing much easier!” Perhaps I can’t comment as much from the perspective of other classes, but that alone is making me thing that there is a significant amount of people that are just riding the bandwagon or colored by their own builds rather than the class as a whole.

If nothing else, though, it’s making me want to alt a necromancer to see why the opinions on this forum (necromancers are terrible, period, PvE and PvP) differ so much from the ones on the GW2guru forums (necros are bad in PvP, but is excellent in PvE, easier than the other two scholar classes, and offers plenty of support with dark fields).

(Also, please do not compare experiences against a warrior or guardian, since every class will feel pretty inferior when matched up against those PvE monstrosities =p).