Guild Wars 2

Simon.3794:

You simply forget the fact that other classes’ heals heal more % of their HP pool
compare warriors’ heals to warrior’s health pool
Which means their heals are more valuable compared to warriors ones..

classic! I am sure theres some greek word describing rhetoric that sounds (is) true at face value but is complete kitten.

That of course is a flawed argument. I disengage from about half the fights vs engis. I have to choice whether to go back in or not. They could never disengage from me.

Actually i was referring to bow

D/D is great for roaming again since patch, really enjoying it. I simply don’t feel overly squishy anymore. I haven’t had a single excessive hit on me for weeks, never been instakilled. Surely we are one of the stronger classes in wvw again.

What works for me is full soldier armor with divinity + 2 travellers, a healing backpiece and weapons + jewelry all zerker. Speccing more defensively doesn’t help me at all, and I do enough damage to pressure any class. Struggle a bit against nade spamming engis and pure glass cannons unleashing when i am busy on someone else. But that makes perfect sense to me.

This patch was make or break for me, but i am more than pleased.

That was informative. thanks for doing my homework.

The Game Slayer.7632:

FLiP.7680:

They don’t need any kind of nerf. The same way i die because of this conditions, i can kill enemies using them. If your main class can’t apply this conditions, it’s your fault for stick with only one character and do not give a chance for different professions.

Every class can apply immob or chill. There are just other classes that can excessively spam it.

So what you’re saying is “Screw balance, just switch to other classes that can abuse them. Then you’ll have fun again.”

Yeaaaa, no.

Well, at least he is honest about it. He holds a majority point of view. Most others will make up arguments why the OP is ‘wrong’ to protect their edge.

Balance is not necessarily something to strive for commercially. Watch the dev streams and see how disconnected it is from the whole ‘collaborative development’ thing.

Keep conditions strong please, i would sooner boost conditions than weaken them.

To put all this QQ into perspective :

All I need to do as elementalist to live through conditions is equip 1 utility and spec 1 talent to cleansing.

What I need to do to live through the current power/crit meta is spec the other 2 utilities and no less than 5(!!!!!!) talent points to stand any chance at all. Of course I can spec differently but then i might meet a hard-counter and get obliterated.

That leaves eles with 1 or 2 talent points and 0 utilities (just the crappy elite). Just to survive comfortably against all classes’ burst. Eles need strong necros for sure.

Just spec different if conditions kill you. I wonder if the people complaining are willing to switch their spec and food just so they can survive necros. My guess is they just don’t like it. Man up!

‘Eles need sustain’ is vague and unworkable.

The more insightful posts are already shifting to the term ‘breathing room’. Sustain would come naturally once we have it.

Breathing room to get a few extra ticks of regen.
Breathing room to cast a heal without getting hit.
Breathing room is why the new Unsteady Ground was such a good, elegant change.
Getting chain-stunned is the opposite of having breathing room.
Healing while invulnerable is having too much breathing room.
Cantrips give breathing room.
RTL nerf hit us so hard because it limits our…

I better stop here.

All MMO’s are textbook examples of software that benefits from ssd. Lots of reading small chunks of data across the drive, writing almost nothing. Go for it.

from this website:
Elementalists are multi-faceted spellcasters that channel elemental forces, making fire, air, earth, and water do their bidding. What they lack in physical toughness, they make up in versatility and the ability to inflict massive damage in a single attack.

So I suggest you use your single attack that does massive damage. Or be more versatile.

phaeris.7604:

After having played a glass canon thief the main thing to remember is the c+d/steal combo is 900 range. (playing ele now).

It can be dodged, and all decent players will do that. Soon as you see them approach use a dodge/aegis/etc, to stop the initial burst. Steal won’t be up for another 20 seconds or so.

They have 4 seconds from stealthing to get into position to backstab, and if using c+d have to be near you to restealth off it. It costs 5 initiative so you can’t afford to screw it up twice in a row.

Basically you should work on timings a bit better.

But…if you’re already in a fight and you get added on by a glass thief then you’re dead. But the same works in reverse so what can you do!

Yeah those are the times you really wish you could become invisible.

Really, just stop the RTL discussions. THEY KNOW AND IT IS WORKING AS INTENDED! Just check the dev comments in november : eles are fine. Then suddenly in december Grouch acknowledges that ‘eles have a problem’ but that was a one time only thing. My guess is he was not supposed to say it.

It is quite absurd to assume you can build a video-game of this complexity and not realize that trapping a low-hp/armor character in melee range would kill it in pvp. I would bet a year’s wage that the guy who came up with RTL in the first place MEANT for it to be a disengage.

You either let eles disengage or you don’t. That’s the bottom line.

Remains the question : what problem was fixed with the RTL nerf apart from SpiritWatch?

I feel like they have been stringing pvp eles along for 8 months, saying just enough to stop people from quitting the game. If it werent for wvw i would have quit a long time ago. If we still suck in pvp in march then i am gone, never playing a ‘cheap’ mmo ever EVER EVER again. My time is too precious to be toyed with like this.

Why not go easy on the guy?

He logically assumed he would be able to play his character competitively for longer than 7 months. He invested time, love and possibly money in the gem store. Unless you think he is clearly wrong then what is wrong with him being critical that anet is not striving for excellence?

GW2 pvp isnt ‘really’ mmo pvp is it? With world pvp and duels etc. It is completely cut off from the rest of the game. To me it has more similarity to Smite than WoW. Grab a toon and play.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

azuzephyr.7280:

Seriously, a handful of tiny shaves is called a Kneejerk change? pvp could use kneejerk changes, lots of them, just test them out on a public ptr beforehand.

I’m not hopefull for this ‘massive’ alteration in the ominous future tbh

This. The only kneejerk changes GW2 ever had was most of the elementalist nerfs (especially double RTL nerf + mistform healing) and the warrior buffs (healing signet + adrenal health) yet suddenly now they only want to shave? Frack that!

Exactly what all pvp eles must have thought after reading that comment Sooner or later you have to make up your mind if it’s ever going to happen. I truly feel a bit sorry for pvp eles. I only wvw and I can totally see why they won’t buff us. That they balance professions around pvp has turned out to be a farce.

Looking at extremes doesn’t say all that much about relative balance.

That being said : I broke 2 records over the last few days (both wvw) :

I received a 13168 backstab followed by about 7500 instakilling me a week ago while being half tanky, i can’t remember ever getting hit for more than 11k before that. He had all stars aligned there and then some.

I hit some level 80 asura with a single meteor shower 3x over 10k two days ago. I finished him around cast finish, like he got hit by the first 5 meteors and they all crit like a truck (one of them new critting trucks). Never seen anything like it. He walked through me when started casting, i wasnt even aiming for the poor guy.

Then again, in both cases the attacker had 12k hp or less.

I am all for a crit nerf.

If I had a new ele and wanted to play d/d in dungeons with some friends, I would :

-go to Orr and grab 5 soldier items from the temples for karma (power/vit/toughness).
-get zerker AND clerics trinkets so you can find a balance/role you are comfortable with.
-spec into cookie-cutter 0/10/0/30/30
-And still bring a staff.

So, reading this thread as an outsider who never pve’s, if all this is true, then you would think that bringing one tanky player into a group of zerkers will make the zerkers job harder. Makes you wonder if it’s really the zerkers who are ‘leet’.

+1 for effort!

It stings that it is so obvious, doesn’kitten

A tweak of a few numbers will probably resurrect d/d in one single sweep, without power creep. It will give the extra breathing room that currently forces people into cantrips, opening up a plethora of new builds that aren’t even on the radar now. It would indeed restore the fluidity of the gameplay and get rid of the unreliability of the spell forcing you to look at the cooldown (if the cooldown is currently even on screen).

But they just…..won’t…….do it…..

Rereading my original post i feel it was way too sarcastic i would rephrase it if i could. . For love of the game i assure you, but im still a very happy customer : I played gw2 for over a year for about 50 euros and nowhere near done yet! Value for money A+.

Merry christmas anet.

xxxx F.

It kinda depends on how important you feel it is to be as effective as possible. Personally I care far more about enjoying myself than making my team win. I am most useful going staff wearing 23k hp with about 600 healing. Survivability is pretty close to guardian’s. Glued to a commander, saving fields for when he asks for it is how ele ‘should’ be played in my humble opinion. . Spreading your boons to anyone nearby. The regen from being in water attunement, EA and attunement switches alone justify bringing an ele. All spells you manage to cast are a bonus, no more.

Note that this is a role that can be played by any ele, no matter how inexperienced. You are pure support so not getting any loot either. Also, it is extremely boring. Like being a WoW priest without getting credit for keeping the tank / raid up.

I zerg mainly d/d nowadays. Half zerker at least. Can’t stay on tag all the time though.
Lots of new ele alts around anyways that don’t mind going pure support every now and then, and my server is winning. So i don’t have to play smart.

Eles are fine but they are being hard-countered by classes that are on the way to being toned down.

That is the latest anet stance I have read on eles. Everybody knows that is wrong, but before anything will change we first need to go through :

1) a patch that doesn’t adress the issues. (10th of december)
2) time for anet to realise d/d still won’t function in pvp. (last time that took 5 months) (march/april 2014.)
3) now a best case scenario : Anet suddenly sees the light and is determined to fix all problems right away, just as people have been telling them for over a year. But it takes them 2 months to do so. May/June 2014.

I obviously made up this timeline but I did base it on experience from the past. Plus, this is like a best case scenario. Isn’t it more likely that they’ll NEVER fix it?

I’m taking a looooong break soon. I’ve had my money’s worth.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

The back to back nerfs on RTL were basically band-aid fixes to problems that were not solved like the movement speed, teleport and mobility issues in Spirit Watch and affected other parts of the game.

Yep that is exactly right. But usually you adjust a map to the existing classes and you don’t mess with the classes to ‘repair’ a map. So much for artistic integrity :p They didn’t publicly test maps then and now the pvp-ers are stuck with zero interesting maps and d/d ele got intentionally kneecapped. Probably for good unless they overhaul pvp to be about …you know… fighting……instead of running around.

Hey thanks /fifteen

My bank : half of it came from boxes. Forget to use em, don’t wanna destroy em. Let alone pay for more lol. Except the karma boosters I use those and lose even more bank space for the flasks. Argh!

The problems of modern man…how do i cope?

Oh wow Anet this looks like a promising path you are taking. I haven’t even read the ele changes and I won’t, because this way you WILL fix things some day I am sure. Go get em tiger!

I played ele since day 1 and i really felt d/d was the best designed MMO character I had ever played. Until about april…..

The only things i can come up with is :

1) Glass cannon staff is extremely powerful already now (talking wvw here). Especially meteor shower and Ice Spike are a bit much already. Be careful it won’t go over the top when eles get buffs.
2) D/D needs help! It’s the flagship weapon set in my book!
3) I love you!

In case people don’t know or forgot, THIS is why we received a nerf to 3 mobility skills : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/The-ele-is-game-breakingly-good-on-spirit

It had nothing to do with being too strong when fighting people or being too mobile in combat. Or anything that was wrong with ele balance. We had already been brought down from ridiculously overpowered to reasonable at that time. The reason was just one map mechanic that was badly designed without eles in mind.

We were unstoppable in mistform + LF + RTL even under the influence of slows. People were possibly right to call us game-breaking. They had to either change the map or change the ele. And they picked the ele cos its easier. It is that simple. And it will last for as long as that map exists. And any discussion anyone might have about ele mobility is completely USELESS.

Learn something every day. So i guess this will be my last post for a bit

AB and AV would be so cool, i am prety sure they would work in gw2. Not wsg though, be careful what you wish for, a few mesmers can help the flag carrier get home in 20 seconds. And knowing anet it will be mesmers that get adjusted not the map. Spirit Watch debacle v2.0

Nice job man! Keep em coming. Great for someone like me with only about 40 matches under my belt.

I’d love to see an ele’s perspective and/or some tactics for the newer maps.

Sssshhhhh stop giving away that supports get zero loot. Lots of them don’t know about tagging. It is even bad to have a healer in your party, get some dps instead. But their heals are welcome though!

LOOK! i made you a handy form, you can reply and just check the box, anet!

[ ] Yes, dear eles, when we kneecapped you, we didn’t realize the impact on mobility!
[ ] Suck it up, losers.

Anet treated RTL as if gw 2 was working perfectly, while it is the glitchy nature of the game making it extra nasty. Apart from what other people have already said:

1) RTL is STILL BUGGY. Now players get punished double when the bug occurs.
2) the cooldown is INVISIBLE to you when out of air attunement for upto 15 seconds, but you can’t always be sure RTL landed by just looking at the action because the feedback is sometimes poor.

Number 2 is a problem because:
-The game isn’t showing all numbers / misses / blocks on the screen (nor combat log) and the sound of RTL is louder than block.
-RTL often does a ‘hickup’ lag when it lands. (the thing that also causes you to stand still ) that cuts out part of auto-attack animation.
-The first hit of air auto-attack is very quick.
-Lag can cause a perfectly timed RTL to hit thin air.
-Even when you RTL multiple people and don’t check they might all have blocked it.

Shonie.5297:

Put 50% of the WvW population into 3 out of 24 servers = threads like this

Is Anet now putting people in servers too? We already have the problem of the 1000’s of opportunists all voluntarily flocking 3 servers despite warning after warning that that might be foolish.

This question understandably comes up every time the old one leaves page 1
And will no doubt continue to do so.

The answer to all ‘why was X nerfed?’ questions is : it had an undesired effect on structured pvp at that time.

In the case of RTL I think it was an orb on a map called Spirit Watch that an ele was just too good at carrying. PVPers will remember.

Nothing wrong with d/d.

Personally i’d spend my talent points towards the popular 0/10/0/30/30, starting with air I , then either water with cantrip utilities (defensive) or arcana with arane utilities (offensive) depending on how squishy you feel.

This is a very slippery slope. So we have two kinds of players now?

The good ones, that are deemed worthy to listen to. And the rest, who can just kitten off, because they’re just not cutting it.

In an international game this is culturally risky stuff. Some people are EXTREMELY sensitive to a ‘chosen few’ system.

Like statistics?

60% of the readers of this thread now feel they will never be a part of the future of gw2.

1) not all damage is showing in combat log
2) class balance in pvp and wvw
3) steal Arathi Basin from WoW (they stole it themselves) and make it into a new pvp map

Go for it, switch! There are far too many eles in wvw just not doing well enough. Cannonfodder. That is by design (balancing for pvp’s elite players although even that failed), not skill. 1 staff buffbot per zerg is plenty, for any other role, pick a different class. Your screenshot is one example of many reasons why being ele just hurts your team.

Try to explain that to an outsider! Actually, they won’t believe someone would make a game like that on purpose, they will think it’s an excuse and you are really not doing it right, so better not!

How this was complaining is beyond me and , sorry, just plain stupid.
“Getting all needed dragonite in wvw is hardly doable for new players.” might have been a hint to the less observant readers.

THAT was the point, as only half of you realize apparently, the other half might want to do some reading comprehension class. Not the fact it takes ME 8 months to get 2000 dragonite. I just use my own gathering speed as an indication that the rewards are off (both between pve and wvw and the type of rewards we ARE getting in wvw). In fact I already have 2 ascendeds, so obviously I already did some camping dragons, but again, that was beside the point.

Gosh you really have to spoon-feed every detail to some people. LEARN TO READ BETWEEN THE LINES!

edit : some posts have been deleted, this post is no longer relevant

Getting all needed dragonite in wvw is hardly doable for new players.

If a person needs 4 weapons, that means 2000 dragonite. At this rate it will take 545 hours of wvw.

Yet I have 50 bloodstone bricks in my bank (5000 dust i will never use up) and 15 empyrial stars plus a stack of fragments. So nobody can accuse me of not playing enough!

3 or 4 ore for a keep that might take hours to take is just not enough to get 2000 ore in half a year. And how will I store all the bloodstone dust that i no longer need, waste obsidian shards to make room? The rewards are TOO GOOD to be able to store, but just THE WRONG KIND.

I don’t like camping dragons so I am chipping away at this, but it will take me months more to get my daggers at this rate.

Screenie of burning speed. We might actually hit something in melee range now

I didn’t notice before. The fire animation is aligned to some axis (it is not quite north for me). It will look worst when using it diagonally, and perfect when you happen to be facing the right way. Sometimes all sprites are grouped in a bunch where you started the burning speed. If this is where the actual aoe is, then this is a bug.

Conjures have charges?? Who knew??

They’re like getting a free Fiat with your Ferrari……

Amongst all the clutter, a consensus seems to surface that ele damage is just fine, but he’s too busy staying alive. I like that conclusion it is how I see things too.

The latest nerfs were malicious. It introduced negativity to eles : dying without making mistakes.

You now have to be sure your RTL actually hits someone. That adds a random element to a fight that was not there before, plus it makes it stupid to use RTL as a gapcloser at its maximum range (which was also nerfed :p). The LF nerfs were equally negative and uncalled for. The stun removal is downright nasty if you die from it. Use what was once the best utility in GW2 (with an appropriately loooong cooldown) but it won’t save you reliably anymore.

Lots of eles refuse to put up with that. There’s always wvw though, where you can pick your own fights more easily.

Anet can’t measure that….so what will happen is :

1) first they wait for the new meta and see if that brings eles back with their shiny new conjured weapons or their staff and people will magically forget that stunning an elementalist WORKS. That should only take another 5 months.
2) when that doesn’t have the desired effect they will adjust the damage / healing / cooldown numbers unnecessarily to restore pvp balance.
3) at the point where eles become viable in pvp again, lots of spike builds or tanky builds or healy builds will surface, seriously affecting other game modes.

And all it takes is to have a really hard look at how an ele fight pans out compared to pre-nerf, especially when he doesn’t initiate the fight.

God i am glad theres wvw

Good luck! I don’t even know the exact hit areas of all moves so i’d be hopeless at that. I do know that both LW and Axe chop are a class of moves called ‘Cleaves’ by anet. I assume every move falls into a category like that. It could be that every Cleave has the same hitbox (i assume a cone in front of you). I’d check if that’s the case before you waste your time comparing apples and pears.

Tei.1704:

OP, don’t listen to too many of the complaints. Ele isn’t bad for pve. It just isn’t meta, but min-maxing for gw2 pve just feels like a waste of time. If you’re competent, you don’t need to min-max to do things in an easy, timely manner. Any properly built ele from glass to bunker has uses and a place in pve. A bunker ele can pretty much solo anything in pve. Just make sure to have some actual precision and crit damage to make your damage respectable. I bunker ele can still stack might/fury and use a bloodlust sigil to make up for low power. I can actually do some things faster on my bunker ele than other classes with dps builds just because eles have such good aoe. Other classes and builds are better at burning down lone champions though. I use a bunker build for fractals because I don’t like dying instantly, and the aoe defense is appreciated by the party.

Glass eles work better for dungeons. You can stack a lot of might and fury for your team while dealing good damage yourself. I know two people that use zerker eles for dungeons and they do well enough. If multiple dungeon runs are planned, I’ll occasionally switch to zerker gear and damage traits. The only reason I don’t just use my ele for everything in pve is because it feels too busy at times, and I don’t like the idea of switching gear and traits a lot. As a warrior, I just drop banners and spam damage skills on cooldown, and I just sit on healing signet. A zerker ele is still blasting fields, dodging more and switching attunements.

Kodiak.3281:

The one area Elementalists excel is in WvW group fighting. While various other classes can bring our advantages to the table there’s no single class that can bring it all in one tidy package. This, more than anything, is why I keep playing my Elementalist. Elementalists are in many ways the backbone of any group force providing a large number of fields to blow up for AOE boons (Swiftness, Might) and AOE Healing.

Agreed, but I say ele is still good for any wvw play from solo to zergs. If you’re alone, you can build yourself to not have any glaring weaknesses. A lot of builds can be hard countered by something very simple. There isn’t any one thing that is going to kill me without some amount of effort or trouble. My guildmates don’t ask me to roam WvW in small groups to be nice, use me as bait or relegate me to siege. I am legitimately very useful in fights because I literally do everything.

Nice post. People underestimate how good it is to have an ele nearby, no matter his spec. Solo pvp play, however IS our glaring weakness. As a high-threat-low-hp an ele is the most likely target for focus, especially in tpvp. And our ability to flee has gone down a lot. ‘Kill the ele quick’ works too good. As far as i’m concerned, thats the only big issue with eles.

Stay on topic please. If ele supporters can contain their bickering, we only have to deal with the regular intentional derails from other classes

So back on topic : Quote : “What I am getting from this is the Elementalist is going the be more capable in healing and CC. Personally I like that direction. What are your thoughts?”

To me, staff ele is like a different class compared to, say, daggers. They play totally different. Obviously that’s a good thing. In fact, i rather play staff ele than any of my alts and now I don’t have to relog to switch.
So I am quite pleased with the coming buffs to staff, especially earth 4. Should be good in wvw zergs.

(offtopic & im repeating myself: But I would gladly give up ALL buffs to staff AND conjureds to get my stunbreaker back on LF!!!)

I sort of put it on hold but i do love to watch other people play on duel servers. I just need practise on my alts before i get in again.

You have to hand it to them : Anet never said they strive for balance between classes (like blizzard did : we love all classes equally). What they wanted is a competitive pvp scene instead, no matter the damage they do to class mechanics. I think i was the very first person to comment (about a year ago) that the elementalists will always be pegged to the dps the very best players in the world can pull off. If that’s not you but you feel strongly about winning, then look elsewhere.

GW2 is a bargain. Bargains often come with a price : in our case 5 months of no tweaks. They clearly used up the allocated dev time on eles.

Sad thing is, most eles really want to play d/d, which they can’t anymore. And the alternatives they are forced into don’t even appear in this graph. LOL!

Even if they fix the meta, eles won’t be happy. I miss playing (also playing against) the old harassing d/d ele, but that gameplay has kind of collapsed. Weird rushed nerfs to mobility a few months ago (RTL+LF). I expected those to be reversed quickly but that never happened.

Ripping the heart out of d/d. THATS the big ele problem for the last 5 months, not the bloody condi meta that everyone is on about now. That’s a bonus on top that clouds the real issue.