Showing Posts For Flavius.9580:
The single target damage just isn’t there, and the amount of effort to get it all out of proportion to results. The basic attacks are all severely underpowered and using combos and attunement switching brings that up to merely lackluster. You don’t realize how weak the ele is until you play another profession. Its aoe is strong, and if you can contrive to use it in pve to round up groups of mobs, then this is actually better than single target damage as such. But doing this in Orr is a real headache.
The lack of weapon swapping is a serious drawback and winds up limiting your options rather severely, too, even with 4 attunements, because every weapon set has limited roles it can perform. Traits have no internal synergy. Cast times are painfully slow. Etc. etc. I’ve moved on and am now working on my 3rd level 80 toon (have a war and ele as 80s, the ele is gathering dust, the war farms, and now I’m working on a mesmer.)
On a side note…a lot of folks seem to be rerolling mesmers. Lowbie zones are full of them on my server. What’s up with that? I hardly ever saw them on either my ele or war on their trips to 80.
Diogo, the problem is only partially one of damage. Even if they brought up single target damage up to speed and jacked up the autoattacks, the class would still be a headache to play due to the attunement system. It’s finicky and demands exceedingly high APM and I don’t believe it will ever be more than a minority taste as a result. Too much busy work. They would have to go back to the drawing board for me at any rate and drop the entire attunement system. I don’t want 20 weak and situational skills that lock me into a single weapon set. I much prefer 10 strong skills and two weapon sets. More in this case is not better. They overdesigned the class. It needs to be streamlined and simplified. The elementalist is GW2 by Rube Goldberg. It’s way too contrived in comparison with any other option.
For obvious reasons. I love the flashy-ness of this profession. But my damage is sooooo underwhelming.
See you guys on the other side.
Ahh another Greatsword warrior player what will happen when they nerf this spec? will you go running to another class ?
Sword/axe, axe/axe, sword/shield, etc.
Warriors have lots of options. GS spec isn’t even the highest dps spec, it just has very high burst, not exactly the same thing. Dual wielding axes does more sustained damage and imo has better aoe. I personally am very fond of sword/axe. And shield builds do surprisingly decent damage if you are used to an ele — comparable damage to an ele as a matter of fact, with far more survivability.
It’s just a much better put together profession than elementalists are and far more efficient in the use of talents. You could remove the GS from the game entirely (I never use one) and this would still be the case.
It’s a serious shortcoming for eles. Particularly if you are going dagger/dagger: you’re locked into melee combat, attunements bekitten
On my warrior I can switch from sword/axe to longbow and do moderate damage at range if things get too hot for melee.
In this case, the warrior’s 10 skills from two weapon sets gives you more options than an elementalist’s 20 skills from 4 attunements.
It is viable, but weak, and overdesigned. Anything it can do can be done better and more easily elsewhere.
I got mine to 80 and then switched over to a warrior and the difference is incredible so far as pve goes. (I still like the ele better in WvW however.)
The profession needs an across the board increase in single target damage. But even if it gets one, at a basic level it is probably broken and unfixable due to the fundamental design choice of attunement swapping. It will be impossible to streamline the class and get it to perform like others due to the Rube Goldbergesque constraints of this design choice. Some people will enjoy this needless complexity, but I predict that will be a minority choice.
Or you can just log on to your warrior, and do anything you need to with no more than 10 keys and a single weapon switch underwater. Oftentimes you can get by with just a spear and ignore the speargun, so that brings it down to 5 keys. (The spear even has a gap closer, or rather a pulling action.)
The elementalist is…overdesigned here, I think. Way too much busy work.
Split the difference and grab 120 each of vitality and precision, imo. You can jack up your precision with consumables, btw. (Cherry pie.)
Having made the switch myself let me assure you: the grass is greener. Warriors are stupidly good. And I didn’t even do the flavor of the month GS build. (I roll sword/axe. Much more mobile than GS.)
It’s pretty faceroll.
Guys, if you’re playing your ele in WvW against a single target, you’re doing it wrong. You should be unloading on groups, not single targets. Look for choke points, seiges, any place you can drop aoe to good effect. You are heavy artillery, not a sharpshooter. Look for ways to affect the flow of combat at the strategic scale.
Our single target dps is unexceptional. (especially in staff, and if you play anything other than staff in WvW…you’re dead.) That’s not the metier of the class. What we do best is aoe, and WvW lends itself to aoe based combat more than anywhere else.
It’s a strong WvW profession. But this is really the only reason to play an ele. It doesn’t excel in any other area of the game. Its lackluster single target damage doesn’t matter in WvW which is about area denial, aoe, and sieges. So you can really go to town with your arsenal of aoe spells and combo fields. Its squishiness is more than made up for by its slipperiness in open world combat. And the zerg gives you endless cannon fodder to take a bullet for you. You won’t ever die in WvW so long as you don’t get any illusions of being Rambo and rush into combat ahead of your zerg.
In solo pve, in dungeons, and in spvp…you can get better results for less effort elsewhere.
So long as you are aware of these limitations, then it’s possible to have fun with an ele. WvW is a pretty big deal at 80, and you can level other professions to do these other parts of the game.
Vaerah, you can only deal more damage with that shotgun on a single target.
In any kind of target rich environment, the ele will handily beat this, and WvW is a target rich environment by and large. (Unless you’re doing guerilla duty deep behind enemy lines with a small squad.) Between splash damage autoattacks and outright aoe spells, the numbers add up fast. Area denial > single target dps in WvW.
It’s just a difference of scale here.
The rifle skill set is good in solo pve where you’re dealing with limited or single targets. You can certainly kite a single mob forever with it, sure. Ditto in spvp.
In WvW the rifle is just a peashooter. The ele has autoattacks which do splash damage, area denial spells of all sorts, combo fields, etc. etc. We eles are the masters of the open battlefield, or at least among the royalty. The class has many problems and I did roll a warrior specifically to play the game in those other areas where I feel the ele is a second class profession. But in WvW we excel.
I switch to air attunement when moving from seige to seige…or when I have to run away. For all practical purposes overland travel is conducted at bonus run speed on demand.
I wasn’t aware of this team heal on the warrior (never unlocked it on mine) but I’m doubting this is anywhere near as useful as an ele attuned to water.
Look, the bottom line is this: you do not play a warrior for combat at range or for heals or for support. They may have limited options in this area, but it’s simply not their main focus and other professions can do these things better, including the ele. If you want to be jealous of anybody in WvW, I can understand, say, ranger envy. (I certainly envy their range.) Warriors are meh there. They are the poor bloody infantry.
Actually, Elementalists are better than warriors in WvW, where melee is merely cannon fodder.
You know that warriors can use rifles and longbows, right?
Sure. But combat at range isn’t their forte and is very much a second best option. More importantly, a warrior cannot lay down aoe and cc at range in the way an elementalist can. Nor can they heal and support at range. (Actually, they can’t heal at all, except for themselves.) There’s really no comparison here. Rifles and longbows are very much auxiliary weapons for a warrior.
And warriors feel so slow compared to my ele at perma 25% run speed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think warriors are stupidly good and simple to play in any other aspect of the game. But in WvW…I’ll stick to my ele. If I had to switch professions in that venue, it would be to a ranger or engineer, not a warrior.
Actually, Elementalists are better than warriors in WvW, where melee is merely cannon fodder. It’s very hard to die as an elementalist in WvW if you know what you are doing. The class does everything at range (you’re going to be using a staff, put those daggers away, you have no business in melee in WvW, hell, melee is bad enough for those professions actually intended for it in) and can trait for speed in Air attunement and zip around the battlefield. Eles are squishy as hell in any other aspect of the game, but in open world combat they simply cannot be pinned down if you have any situational awareness. This isn’t Orr where there’s some stupid mob every 10 yards to aggro. You almost always have the option of pulling a Sir Robin and cleanly running away.
But for just about any other purpose, the warrior is superior. Especially solo pve. The profession practically plays itself. Sill, I love WvW which is arguably one of the main things left to do at level 80, so my ele gets played a lot for that, while my warrior does all the scrub work in Orr.
We did get our elite skill for water combat, which is nice. More of a bug fix than a buff, but I’ll take it.
Still going to avoid underwater combat on the ele, though.
Rithral, on the other hand, my warrior feels like cannon fodder in WvW. That toon tears it up in solo pve, but my elementalist hardly ever dies in WvW. I can disengage from almost any bad WvW situation on the ele in a way my warrior cannot.
It really depends what you want to do.
The profession excels in WvW. It’s the premier AoE class of the game with superb mobility and support options. I would stay the hell away from melee generally for WvW, but even among the ranged options, this profession stands out.
It’s probably the worst solo PVE profession in the game; anything it can do, somebody else can do far more easily, with more survivability. Damage is lackluster for single target outside of combo moves, which are not always easy to pull off. It’s a finicky profession with Rube Goldbergesque levels of button pushing to achieve moves that others can do in one or two buttons. This can be fun…or tedious and exhausting. Mileage definitely varies. I will not farm mats in Orr on my Elementalist, let’s just leave it at that. Boring and repetitive tasks are better suited for simpler professions.
It’s starting to get a rather bad rep in dungeons and sPvP due to its fragility.
For variety, after finishing up my ele at 80, I’m working on a war now, which is almost the polar opposite of my ele in terms of strengths and weaknesses.
(edited by Flavius.9580)
I find the simplicity of other classes refreshing, myself. At least when I’m farming mats. Finishing up a warrior right now for this reason. Farming on an ele is exhausting. My war gets the job done with a fraction of the effort involved, and I’m really not looking for complexity when mining in Orr, I just want to hit the nodes quickly and efficiently.
It’s not an advantage; it’s busywork. Other professions can accomplish similar things with fewer moves. And OP is quite right that synergies are lacking within traits. The elementalist is forced to take weaker skills that carry over when switching to other attunements, substituting breadth for depth.
I one shot that mission, but it took me a half hour to do it. A real pain in the neck. You have to keep shifting between attunements, especially back to air to tag this mob when he ports away and starts shooting stuff at you. With ride the lightning and a couple of forward dodges, you can get there without getting too badly messed up. Saving arcane shield for this also helps.
But my damage was so low and the windows of dps time so small that it took a very long time to bring the mob down. I can see other professions having problems with this guy, btw. Elementalists are at least highly mobile and that helps a lot on this fight. A ranger is almost certainly the strongest profession for this fight. I’m not looking forward to doing it on my warrior who is kind of slow moving compared to my elementalist.
So far as elementalists are concerned, I think you have to do this fight as dagger/dagger, or perhaps scepter/dagger. Ride the lightning is virtually mandatory for it. Air elementals (both lesser and major) are also handy. And be patient, this isn’t a quick fight for an elementalist, due in large part to the fight mechanics.
I was able to solo all personal story missions except for the very last one to kill Zhaitan (which requires a group near as I can tell.) They get a lot harder towards the end, though, and some of them I had many wipes on before I figured out a proper skillset to approach them. Generally speaking, staff builds got less and less useful as time went on, and I switched almost exclusively to dagger builds.
For whatever it is worth, leveling my warrior has so far been a breeze compared to my elemental. (Just hit 40 on the war.) Better damage, more survivability, and frankly much simpler to use even with weapon swaps, there’s not that many skills to worry about. After hitting 80 I’ve mostly retired my ele except for WvW, which is the one thing she excels at. My war is better for solo pve and farming mats. (But I’m doubting she’ll be anywhere near as good in WvW. So the grass isn’t always greener.)
(edited by Flavius.9580)