Guild Wars 2

What have you done to Khylo?? I was planning to play again after more than a year of stopping when I saw that a new update is on its way, and this change makes me want to continue NOT playing the game anymore.

It’s one of those “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” or something.
But yeah, I get that there are skill interaction/balance issue involved but gutting the map like this and dumbing it down so hard is so disgusting and disappointing for a returning player.

Auras or riot

I literally facepalmed after reading the first four changes.

New icons. Glyphs now OP!

Great -.-

garethh.3518:

The game needs to avoid strong passive or AI specs since the game isn’t team centric. Team based fighting is social, which gives allot of lee-way, it also in and of itself adds allot to the skill-floor and skill-cap making mindless specs and traits seem allot less mindless. GW2 doesn’t do that, which means it needs, it kittening NEEDS dynamic active specs.

So…
Seriously?
These are their ideas to make the game better?
Click-and-forget-me bonuses to vitality or healing or attack speed…. like what the kitten?
Are you sure they didn’t say PvE patch on the 15th???

I mean the elementalist one is the closest to a PvP change (if useless) I’ve always saw allot of good potential in ele-healing, it is allot of fun and positioning and teamwork related.
To do that, they really should have focused on revamping a few skills though, to make it more play/counter-play centric, and stronger, so it could be a viable, entertaining mid.
Like adding channeled heals or more lingering aoes that heal.
Passive buffing what healing eles have already at the cost of a tier 3 trait… it’s not bad, but it’s sure as hell not good either.

This is more likely what I feel after reading the preview for the upcoming patch. The things that are most likely complained about in-game like passive and AI stuff are now being increased by adding more passive traits and AI stuff improvements. Yeah, the previewed traits are the tip of the iceberg but knowing that the things previewed are of this kind, I can’t help myself thinking too negatively for the things yet to be revealed.

Whereas traits like Evasive Arcana, Deceptive Evasion, Illusionary Persona, and the upcoming change to Dhuumfire, which changes how skills work or add flavor to simple skills and dodges are much for fun to experiment, play with and play against, passive bonuses and stats does not add more depth to gameplay. I know things like these need more time and creativity, but waiting for too long just to see a bunch of “click-and-forget-me bonuses” just saddens me.

SkiTz.4590:

This for real lol? Too fast? it’s not even fast, its not even normal speed, its not even too slow

It’s too *kitten * slow

and it will remain at this snail’s pace because
1) NCsoft is in charge here
2) Because of ^, gemstore additions + LS will remain top priority. Until stated otherwise

Why not add an item in the Gemstore called “PVP Balance Patch Update Kit” with the description: “Balance patch will hit the game once a batch of the PVP Balance Patch Update Kit gets sold out! Then the amount of Update Kits in the Gem Store gets automatically refreshed. The more you buy Kits, the faster the balance update!”

Hurray for Gem Store Sales!!

sorrychief.2563:

Funny actually how things change. Now nobody wants an ele.

Yeah. Good times. Good times.

And I realized I haven’t played for a month now I think. I’m just waiting for that big balance patch that will supposedly shake up the meta. And shaking things a bit for Anet means making OP builds obsolete and creating new faceroll braindead cheesy OP builds. But something in me wants to think that this will not be the case. Let’s just wait and see.

Wintel.4873:

Staff zerker in hotjoins is quite fun. It’s best never to take PvP seriously when playing Ele.

This.

It’s possible that most veteran PVP players are taking a break until that BIG BALANCE patch arrives. So that leaves us now with newbies testing the water or PVE players playing some SoloQs for dailies and some silver.

Wintel.4873:

pdemo.8312:

L2p noon if anything it needs a buff. Mesmer is very popular and they use zerker.

Only due to the same reasons that Thieves use zerker (stealth) with the addition of AI.

Amen to that

Conjure Ele anyone?

Bran.7425:

Zero Day.2594:

Nerf everything but the warrior guys.
It’s the only prof that’s balanced and is not OP at all.

Somewhere there is a video of profession discuss where the generally idea of buffs to everything else would be a nerf to warrior, I can hope it was sarcasm, but the forums general vibe makes me think it is kind of the view that many would take.

I think he just forgot to add /sarcasm in his post dude.

zone.1073:

The only thing going for warriors is their handful of good weapons that do cool things in combination with traits, and a heal that makes them feel less like wet toilet paper. Longbow is cool. Hammer is cool. Sword is cool. That’s it.

The word “cool” in those sentences can be replaced with “easy mode” and it makes more sense.

Wintel.4873:

Was playing on my guardian yesterday. Out of nowhere this Ele comes and arcane power + PoM + pyroblast me for 15k, instantly downs me from full health. While I’m down a thief attacks him and he just frost nova + blinks away, sheeps the thief and then explodes him with arcane blast + barrage + kiting. Mana shield absorbs all damage.
Then he opened a portal to karka queen and killed her solo.

Doesn’t need any skill to play, just way too OP and needs nerf.

LIES!! I call bull. The portal led to Scarlet and NOT karka queen. An ele soloed Scarlet! I saw it through twitch livestream the other day.

Everyon is afraid of ele. Ele poses too much a threat in every game and instill fear on everyone in every single match that’s why they are always the priority target. This has to be stopped. I’m always scared when there’s an ele on the enemy team, I never want to get out of my base.

Deified.7520:

They just need to learn how to split people up.

1. Too many Events spawned in close areas

2. You awarded based on kills, not on event completion.

3. No depth to the fights. They’re just like the Scarlet Invasions. No interactables, not really interacting with NPCs.

On point number 2 and 3, that’s just pretty much what happens in a zerg. If you can’t tag a lot of mobs, you’re screwed. Which is basically a flaw in the gameplay mechanic of choosing how you want to play since if you’re specced for support with not much fir power, aoe or cleave damage, you are awarded with nothing. Hence the zerker dps zerg blobs killing everything and anything in a matter of seconds.

I can pretty much beat some warriors. But most of the time, it’s because the warrior isn’t using hambow and healing signet..

Alkaholic.3875:

Warriors can swap every 5 secs. Engineers can swap every second. Still confused.

I give up.. -_-

Alkaholic.3875:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Alkaholic.3875:

Did I miss something? Rifles count as 2 hander and so does GS/Hammer. Please clue a nub in…

Two-handed weapons will now be slotted with two sigils on the upcoming balance patch. And each sigil will have individual ICDS compared to the Global ICDS they currently have right now. Or haven’t you heard? But I guess you haven’t yet. Please clue a clueless in…

Soooo, u’re saying that a warrior that slots 4 seperate sigils, 2 in each 2hander, will have an advantage over an engie, who slots 2 in his 2hander rifle. Why again?

Sigils
Sigil of Battle (gain [2, 3] stacks of might for 20 seconds)
Superior Sigil of Doom (next attack poisons)
Superior Sigil of Energy (gain 50% endurance)
Superior Sigil of Geomancy (bleeds nearby foes for 7 seconds)
Superior Sigil of Hydromancy (freeze nearby foes for 3 seconds)
Superior Sigil of Intelligence (next attack has a 100% critical hit chance)
Superior Sigil of Leeching (next attack steals health)

Please point out a scenario that makes the war OP compared to the other 2 classes.

I deny you the luxury of not thinking it through.

But I’ll give you a clue: 4 is a greater number than 2

Alkaholic.3875:

Did I miss something? Rifles count as 2 hander and so does GS/Hammer. Please clue a nub in…

Two-handed weapons will now be slotted with two sigils on the upcoming balance patch. And each sigil will have individual ICDS compared to the Global ICDS they currently have right now. Or haven’t you heard? But I guess you haven’t yet. Please clue a clueless in…

ronpierce.2760:

zone.1073:

gesho.9468:

there was huge thread by lordrosiky on this. no dev response. i hope there will be drop-in ladt minute war nerf in the patch. signet nerf is nthing, pin down, okay, offers some intelligent counter for kiting. but overall, war will be top tier of health, toughness, healing, damage and control (top, or one of the top in each category), that is – crazy op.

Play a warrior in arenas and you’ll understand why they need to be tough and have a sturdy body.

Take away their damage? They become guardian copies. Take away their tankiness? They become thieves.

Yes, so lets make the ultimate GUARDIANTHIEF, best of both worlds, balance.

Based on his argument, you’re spot on dude. Guardianthief. Hmmmm. I like the sound of that.

Alkaholic.3875:

Hides my kit swapping engie and attunement switching ele.

Yes because both can only slot a maximum of 2 sigils whereas a warrior can slot 4. Warriors always win.

Yay for warriors!

Marcos.3690:

Im happy about eles but i fear the new sigil system will destroy the game

Broken builds will be expected because of the revamping of runes and sigils and so many changes promised.

Let’s just hope for ANet to adjust and fix the broken ones fast enough before everyone starts quitting. And when I say fast.. well.. let’s just hope for the best.

style.6173:

Wintel.4873:

style.6173:

entropy.9613:

Always good to see eles.

On the other team.

You just haven’t played with good eles.

You just haven’t played with good <insert any other class here>.

Assuming equally skilled players (i.e. average), an Ele is going to lose to most classes/builds and get blown-up in group fights.

Eleis actually in worse shape than it seems at first glance, because people don’t realize that most long-time Ele players are always playing one step ahead of everyone else. The only way Ele’s stand a vague chance of winning fights is by vastly out-playing the opponent (or burst them down when they are busy with someone else).

That is an insult to every good ele player out there. There are definitely highly talented players.

He’s actually praising them for doing good even with an underdog class. It takes skill to play an ele effectively.

Jeff.4680:

I really wish they would add more instanced stuff. Especially since I’m more fond of the story rather than mindless killing of mobs and picking up loot.

Yeah, but they’ve decided to expand on Living World content because Personal Story System was a flop. But sometimes I liked the calm, somehow challenging, and story driven (although story still needed improvement) of Personal Story Instances than zergy encounters.

I also wish they would have added some stuff for solo instances too and people can choose between the best of both worlds.

The Double Cooldown on Ride the Lightning really has to go. It’s beyond stupidity.

Levis.6137:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Fake is 69, without Skyhammer.

I know and i have great respect for this, anyway you can see it in the leaderboards, his played tpvp and yoloqueue matches.
But there are people running around with rank 69 i never heard of and this it what drives me crazy.

MMO players love to farm. Or grind. For shinies!

selan.8354:

aleks.5473:

Nerf ele’s are you mad haha. People dont play eles becouse they die in 1 sec.

its 6 seconds….they got armor of earth…….

Armor of Earth too OP. Please remove Stability and apply Immobilize on Ele instead because earth is too heavy to be made an armor.

Eles got shafted in Traits together with Skill Cooldowns, Cast Times, Sustain, HP Pool and Armor because they have so many visually appealing skill animations. That’s the cost of being too flashy.

teogeos.1364:

I’m not qqing nor saying it’s op of course, but it’s pretty cheesy.

If it’s not cheesy, it’s not viable. That’s basically how Guild Wars 2 works for every class right now.

One mesmer alone is fine and finding the real one isn’t rocket science. Two can be very tricky. Three? Goodluck with that.

A mesmer coupled with other pet classes like Spranger and MM Necro is a nightmare. The screen clutter makes you want to pick up your vacuum and use it on your monitor. Stacking pet classes is the problem.

And for those that defend mesmers, yeah mesmers can only generate three clones at a time but once shattered, can generate another set and thus results in more than 3 clones present on the battlefield as long as the shattered clones have not shattered yet. I do not support the suggestion of reducing the number of illusions generated but I think what would be a nice solution is a better targetting system and a way to counter screen clutter.

I use Elemental Surge for the Immobilize and Blind most of the time on my Nuker Staff Ele. Immobilize on Stoning (with arcane power) is great for ensnaring a running opponent. Blind on Chain Lightning (with arcane power) is a nice DPS that can nullify some nasty mesmer/thief/warrior bursts.

It has its uses. But fairly limited and does not have a lot of synergy when making builds due to dependence on Arcane Skills. It’s like trying to build around condi for the effect of the trait but you have to equip arcane skills which are burst/power type utility skills. Although the duration of the conditions dealt does need some improvement since this trait is WAAAY behind Evasive Arcana in terms of utility. OR they can improve or redesign Arcane Power since the skill ultimately synergizes with this trait and both of them are hardly ever used or seen in play. They can also even make this trait proc with some ICD on Conjured Weapon skills to make Conjures more attractive and Conjures don’t have a lot of trait it synergizes with anyway so tying it with elemental surge could be a fun change.

Traits and Runes that improve reviving needs to be looked at. I’ve never known anyone using them. Ever.

Party wide boons, heals and what-not need some better sharing mechanic other than stacking on top of one another within 240 radius or so just to get the boon or heal. It forces ranged support classes (Staff ele) to be in the thick of the battle just to share some boons and heal partymates. 1200 range become kitten for support roles.

Balefire.7592:

Just to carry over one reddit suggestion I found interesting:
Missed stealth attacks remove stealth, but do not apply revealed.

NOOOOO! That would force players to do better at positioning to actually hit the target on the first attempt and not be allowed to spam as long as they’re stealthed. That’s horrible

Wintel.4873:

Jayden Ennok.3687:

So this is essentially a rant that you got 1 shot by anything?

Fixed

I giggled a little.

dietzero.3514:

Move it to 5 points in Air, then you can nerf it.

You don’t like Zephyr’s Speed?

You are an elementalist. You have flashy animations. That’s more than enough to compensate for all the limitations you have been given – stat wise, armor wise, trait wise, casting time wise, cooldown wise.

I’ll trade my warrior’s healing signet for some sparkly lightning and fire when I swing my sword please.

Unloveableone.6082:

To see it burn and truly get attacked and possibly destroyed actually brought a few manly tears to my eyes.

Yeah. All kinds of bodily fluid tried to come out of me all at once when I watched the trailer of Escape for Lion’s Arch.

I felt excitement, fear, anger, and remorse all at the same time. The hype for the upcoming patch is something closely similar to the hype when the game was about to be released. I hope ANet won’t disappoint. This might be the start of the game’s redemption.

Avigrus.2871:

Necro still wins at bag farming though…

My guardian fellas sprinkling fairy pixiedust with their staff auto beg to disagree.

The seven classes all have their strengths with respect to where and how you play them and it’s fairly easy to tell which are the most popular in each of the respective format:

PVE Dungeons – Warriors and Guardians
PVE Open World – Warriors and Ele
WvW Zerg – Warriors and Guardians
WvW Roaming – Thief and Mesmer
PvP Hotjoins – Thief and Mesmer
SoloQ – Warriors, Necro and Engie
TeamQ – Guardians and Engie

I think Ranger is the most problematic or the least favored class in all types of gaming format for GW2. The pet mechanic sucks so bad. Plus really really boring weapon skills. Most of the useful chunks for ranger are in the form of passive play. But that’s just IMO.

Writetyper.1985:

the “s” stands for “silly”

I kind of believed that for a moment.. o_o

kito.1827:

i like classes who can tank a lot of damage while dealing an insane amount at the same time, some CC is nice also.

as the balance philosophy of guildwars says that there is no class in purpose of doing all these, i would choose as follows:

1.) warriors for their tankiness
2.) warriors for their dmg
3.) warriors for their CC

Seems legit

There’s more to build diversity than stat allocation and providing players the tool to freely alocate stat points will not open up to make more builds but rather make meta OP cookie cutter builds as the person above me has pointed out.

Build diversity can happen when the existing stat combinations are adjusted in a way that specific amulets do not have a huge role in defining generic builds or add more interesting but well thought out stat combinations.

But for me, the more interesting part of making a build is selection of skills. More choices on utilities that will make players decide what to bring depending on what they want to provide on the battlefield. More choices on utilities and healing skills. Adjustment on the most commonly used skills, and improvement on the completely ignored stuff. I mean, there obviously is a reason why skills never get picked, right?

Also, I would want to see the ability to at least modify weapon skills. For examply, skills 2 3 4 and 5 on one weapon set have two to three interesing choices that would decide the purpose of the selected weapon – damage, control, support, defense, etc. It’s more difficult to balance, but at least it brings up some interesting variety unlike what we have now – once you see a warrior with a longbow, you’ll know you’ll die being pinned down and autoattacked by burning arrows on a crazy large fire field.

Pwent.2639:

Pre rtl nerf eles fell on the op side of unbalanced and if you started to take them down all they had to do was mistform rtl and they vanished… then they got nerfed hard in all the soft places. I dont mind the rtl nerf but would like something to make up for the mistform one.

Yeah nerfing one or the other strong aspect of D/D ele would have been more merciful. Instead, they nerfed EVERYTHING ele got across the board. Now look at what happened.

NO. Stop suggesting stuff like this. Look at what happened to “Necromancer should have access to burning.” Do you want any more Dumbfire type of cataclysmic updates? UGH!

And as far as class themes go, Fear does not fit mesmer in my opinion. Fear should solely be Warrior and Necro unique abilities, Confusion for Mesmer and Engies. I really think they should’ve stick with this kind of thematic roles for each class where certain classes lack something but has unique access to other things in return. I mean, if all classes have access to all kinds of conditions, might as well have one class that has access to all kinds of skills. That’s not balance. That’s laziness in a whole other level. But I think that’s just me.

Avascar.9237:

Only took a year!

Let’s wait another year for them to revamp the borderlands into something similar like EoTM.

Zenjii.6819:

Eles have to have a strong downed state because that’s where they spend a great deal of their time.

QFT.

Marsares.2053:

Very much like the Warrior’s Healing Signet that has better HPS without any preconditions and never really want use their active. ;-)

YOU DID NOT JUST COMPARE HEALING SIGNET WITH OTHER SIGNET HEALS! HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!

Phaeton.9582:

Hope they can be used for conquest too though..

HELL NOOOOOO

K U T M.4539:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Fire Shield
Elementalist, Any class with Leap Combo Finisher on Fire Field

Worst aura by far. A defensive tool designed for offensive usage in a very underwhelming way. Envelop yourself in a shield of fire that burns foes (1 second) and grants might (1 stack 10 seconds) each time you are struck (cooldown of 1 second per attacker). Aura duration of 5 seconds and skill cooldown of 40 freakin seconds. -_- Not only should you be getting hit, you should be getting hit by quite a lot and quite frequently to see some results.

If the reason for the pathetic effects (1 Might stack and 1 second burn) is that fire fields are too common and comboing for fire aura can become OP, at least the skill on the ele’s weapon set should have waaaaay shorter cooldown than 40 seconds. I doubt that anyone will warrant it as OP even on 15 seconds CD. It’s just a worthless skill in the focus off-hand to have too long a cooldown.

What’s funny is that you can get Fire Aura on D/D on a lower CD than on focus, but it doesn’t proc aura share if you use that. It does proc Zephyr’s Boon and Elemental Shielding, though.

Combo Auras are pretty much screwed for eles since traits seem to not work for them and Signet Auras is just all Fire Auras and we know how horrible Fire Aura is.