Guild Wars 2

Agent Noun.7350:

mygamingid.5816:

Outside of Meteor Storm, Staff is really weak on 4 & 5 skills, making it a poor choice for Weaver builds. Grieving will be great for power builds looking to increase condi damage on the side, but it’ll be difficult to top Vipers and a condi-focused rotation under the current build.

Why not Sinister? You can easily max burning duration with traits, runes, and sigils alone, so Sinister lets you pile on the Condi Damage even more than Viper. Or are we trying to maximize bleed duration as well?

True, all you need is a set of runes of Balthazar and some burning duration food and you get 100% burn duration because the traits give you the other 40%. You could replace the food with a sigil of smoldering but that would be a waste imo. Just run a sigil of force and a sigil of bursting.

I am interested in finding out if sinister or grieving gear will be better with such a setup though. They both have the potential to work.

Upon further review, one thing that I noticed is that the vast majority of the dual skills have no defenses built into them except for the very ineffective barrier from elemental refreshment. In addition, some of them are weaker than the standard number 3 skills that they replace. If those could be re-balanced to actually make up for the defense that you lose from your 4 and 5 skills being locked behind the attunement gcds, then changes to the profession mechanic may be avoidable. I don’t know if extra barrier is the solution or if more types of defenses need to be added to them, but they do need something extra.

Just offering an alternative solution to changing the way the profession mechanic works, in case the dev team is determined to keep the mechanic as it currently is.

voidvector.2780:

Eddbopkins.2630:

voidvector.2780:

No, its fine.

For PvE, just find a rotation and stick to it.

For PvP, take Unravel.

taking unravel means you dont take armor of earth, or mist form, or cleansing fire, or arcana blast, or any other more useful skills then what unravel does. Ele already has a hard enough time with stun brakers and useful utility skills. now you want it to have another skill thats useless 75% of the time in a fight? no your wrong sir it needs to change.

Here’s an idea – run Tempest instead if you can’t survive.

Weaver is not a replacement for Tempest. They are both elite options for Elementalist.

Yeah, it’s not a replacement, which is why it needs a PvP damage-focused build that is viable. Tempest is support.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Gonna add my two coppers:

1. Damage is way too low on sword, and being kited will result in a quick loss for you. I play d/d and it at least has a 600 range auto on water. I think sword needs this too on one of the attunements.

2. Barrier might as well not even exist. It’s useless in its current form. A single auto attack will rid it, even with extra stacks built up. Also, it decays waaaaaaaay too quickly. It’s in dire need of a numbers increase across the board.

3. I know a lot of people are complaining about the attunement cds, but honestly, I’m okay with it. I do think it serves as a good balance point if the above 2 are fixed.

1. I for one am not completely sure if sword needs a damage buff. It may just need a mobility buff, by making flame uprising and polaric leap have a higher range. Let’s not forget that too many damage buffs may end up making weaver pretty broken in raids.

2. Barrier does seem to be a pretty minimal survivability boost atm. It really feels lackluster.

3. The global cooldown is needed so you don’t swap between elements too quickly, but I don’t think that there is a justification for not being able to double tap the same attunement to access skills 4 and 5. Ele just depends on those skills too much for defense to not be able to access them immediately and as was established before, barrier is not enough to make up for this. Even if barrier was enough to make up for this loss, the damage-focused elementalists need to gain survivability from speccing into weaver, instead of keeping the same amount of survivability. So I would argue that we need both a good barrier and instant access to 4 and 5 if DPS ele is to be viable competitively in PvP modes.

Also, unravel is not a good solution. You sacrifice a utility slot for something that feels like it needs to be baseline and when you use this skill you cannot access dual attunements for 5 seconds. The 25 second recharge also feels like another hinderance in this case. I can see myself needing to access 4 and 5 skills multiple times within that time frame. However, I can see how double-tapping could be broken if combined with attunement swapping traits like sunspot and lightning strike. Please, just give us double-tapping and give those traits a cd to prevent abuse.

Imo the main issue is just not being able to access 4 and 5 fast enough. If this can be solved, I think the spec will mostly be fine with only numbers needing adjustments with balance patches. But the solution seems pretty simple to me, so I hope the devs realize this and make a quick fix before release.

Ayrilana.1396:

A large part of this game is centered around cosmetics.

I don’t know if you realise this, but this is the main argument for why something should be done about some infinite gathering tools having better functionality than others. Just like you stated, this game is centered around cosmetics.

This is exactly why we can use transmutation charges to change the looks of our armor and weapons. If this wasn’t the case, you would see a very large portion of the playerbase doing content in a full standard ascended set. In fact, these tools are like the ascended versions of the normal infinite gathering tools, with the only difference being in that you cannot reskin them.

At the very least, gathering tools should unlock their skin, so that you can skin over other gathering tools. Otherwise, an alternative would be to unlock unique gathering tool perks instead. So if I had both a watchwork pick and an unbound one, I could select the get either sprockets or UM from any pickaxe I have in my possession. This would still make UM and watchwork tool purchases the superior choice, but at least more people would use the other tools for their skins.

Danikat.8537:

Whilst I agree it would be nice to see more new armour sets I think it’s unlikely to happen for exactly the reason you gave.

Designing weapons is relatively simple because the models are universal – a sword held by a human thief is identical to a sword held by an asuran mesmer etc. So they come up with a theme, adapt it to the shape of each weapon and maybe add some individual details if it’s appropriate and they’re done – 16 new weapons for everyone.

Armour is not universal and therefore requires a lot more work. At absolute minimum they have to create 4 versions of each set – one for male humans/sylvari/norn, one for females, one for asura and one for charr. And that’s assuming they can stretch the human/sylvari version to fit the norn (which players complain about) and use the male version on female asura and charr (which players complain about). Ideally they need to create 10 versions – one for each race/gender combination.

And then they have to do that again for the other 2 armour weights. That’s a minimum of 12 models and a maximum of 30 for what players will see as only 3 new armour sets.

It seems they are experimenting with ways to offer new armour skins without it being so much effort – every Living Story episode this season has included at least 1 piece (head, gloves or shoulders) with the same skin used for all 3 armour weights. Even if they just stick with that it’s an improvement, but they might be able to expand on the concept in future.

Also I assume the next expansion will include new armour like HoT did.

The problem with their current approach is that the main reason people ask for armor sets instead of just armor pieces is because chest and leg armor only comes with sets. There are plenty of gloves/feet/head/shoulder armors being added, but there is a severe lack of chest and legs, which are the most important pieces when crafting your appearance.

I don’t think that they need to make sure that every armor weight gets a reward in every season of LW3. For example, they could just add different chest weights in different episodes. I wouldn’t mind that at all.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Yet mesmer staff, which is second lowest weapon on the list, is meta. (Dps between druid staff aa and mesmer GS aa at max range isn’t that much different btw, i tested it once) Many weapons that are high on this list are trash and some with low autoattack dps are meta. This list IS meaningless. There are plenty of other things that have to be factored in when talking about how good or bad a weapon is.

True, and even when comparing the auto-attacks DPS is not everything. Some autoattacks are simply way easier to avoid than others, and some can have additional effects.

AndyS.5630:

maddoctor.2738:

I suspected as much. So in other words, in a group that consists of a mirror comp, Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer, +2 Eles, the 4 total Eles will deal more damage than a group of 10 Eles. Just the FOUR Eles will deal more damage than TEN Eles.

It isn’t as simple as that: Eles will give each other some Might (Overload Fire) and 10 of them will likely cap Vulnerability (Weak Spot). So 10 Eles will have more buffs than 1 Ele, but will still miss some unique ones like banners, druid and chrono stuff.

With that being said, Eles have a lot of useful features besides their highest DPS on large hitbox.

Take a normal Staff ele:
- “Wash the Pain Away!” is not only a great self-healing skill, but it is also a group healing skill.
- 1200 range, as much as it is not mentioned, but being able to attack from further than 130 units can help in many fights. In some even all 1200 units are required for maximum benefit.
- Not only high range, but also all attacks are cleaving multiple foes. And that cleaving radius is 180 so it’s larger area cleave, than most melee weapons have.
- Attunements provide a great deal of versatility. Again, not useful everywhere, but you can cycle through several attunements for a lot of CC. You can go Water for some group healing (not all that good, but still helps, especially with several Eles).
- They already bring some group Might and some Vulnerability. Can easily spec into some Fury as well.

Now, primary raid healers are usually those that get some healing-oriented elite specs. Versatility of Ele attunements opens up Auromancer as a very good raid healer (even though generally underused).

Now if we talk about general balance, there is no balance between skills affecting self-only and self+friends. Compare already mentioned “Wash the Pain Away!” and <Insert any self-heal here>. Selfishness can’t be kept as class concept, because it doesn’t work well in group content (read: introduction of raids requires such concept to be dropped from each class that has it).

I’m just going to have to say here that “Wash the pain away!” Is a pretty bad self-heal skill after the nerf. Sure it is nice for allies in group content, especially if you actually invested in healing power. However, if you compare it to something like glyph of elemental harmony, you will see that the selfish option is much better at being selfish.

In my opinion, selfish professions like necro desperately need good supportive options for group content in their new elite specs. Professions that already have many selfless skills could probably use some more selfish options for solo content and for some variety. After all, they already have a place in groups.

Not sure if this is related, but I lost all of my gems. I had around 2440, I think.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

maddoctor.2738:

6 Armor sets were released on the gem store.
Aetherblade: June 25, 2013
Phoenix/Magitech/Braham: July 30, 2013
Trickster/Viper/Phalanx: October 29, 2013
Flamekissed/Flamewalker/Flamewrath: November 26, 2013
Zodiac: February 18, 2014
Incarnate/Rampart/Strider: April 15, 2014

From August 2012 to April 2014 (release to the last gem store armor set) we got 6 new Gem store Armor sets, that’s ~20 months for 6 sets
And June 2013 to April 2014 is less than a year for 6 sets

To be honest, I don’t agree with the idea of compiling three vastly different armor sets like Viper, Trickster and Phalanx as one armor set. It’s very misleading. I’d see it more as three sets being released at the same time, given their themes and appearances are unique relative to one another.

And also the fact that they sell each of them seperately.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Finalfreefall.8247:

We need more elite specs.

The complaints I see in Pvp, Pve, and Wvw all focus around a lack of content and build paths. This game needs diversity to get it back up and going again.

Edit: While we’re at it fix Revenant. More skills, actual dialogue from the legends. This stuff should have been in the game at launch.

Diversity is a myth. There will always be one build that works better than the other’s for a given class. It’s a fact and we have to get use to it.

There will always be a best option, but what matters is how much better it is than other options. If alternative options are for example 30% worse, they will never be used. However, if some options are 5% worse they will be used and that is something that can create a rotating PvP or WvW meta due to the nature of counter-builds.

As it is now elite specs have dramatically increased the gap between meta and non-meta builds. At least with more elite specs, there will be more options that are relatively close to each other, compared to what we have now.

joneirikb.7506:

Nejra Korjenic.5238:

So,…
- give us a new tab for town clothing, like we had during the beginning times of the game
- give us the choice to obtain costumes also as skin-packs

alternatively:
- give us the option to toggle all slots of a costume on/off and also a second option there to toggle if we want to show nothing or the item of our current actual armour

Unfortunately:
- They moved away from that system entirely in favor of costumes, it won’t return ever. No matter how much we beg and whine.
- That would require even more work than making the skin packs in the first place, not going to happen.
- Not possible either, the costumes are made as a complete set, many of them doesn’t have anything at all under the shoulder-pads etc. It would unfortunately be too much work for what it is worth (for them, they’re a company). Afaik there is no possible way to even accomplish mixing armor/outfit parts like that, the game can’t do it the way it’s setup.

I’m not happy about these things either, but if we’re going to ask for something, it would be better to ask for something that has a chance of happening.

Two outfit improvements that could happen are:

-Enabling helmet skins to be used with the outfit, since the head of the outfit can be hidden already.
-Saving dyejobs to particular outfits, to make swapping them more convenient. Right now, swapping them is only convenient if they are undyed or if you want all of them to have the same colors.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Their policy has been changed to outfits in the gemstore, armor in the game. If, as they say, a set of armor for a 3 armor weights, 5 races and 2 sexes takes 9 months to make then all the wishing in the world isn’t going to get armor made faster. In the meantime outfits are cheap and easy to make and brings them needed money. So, any people calling for no more/fewer outfits and more armor are not going to get either.

The 3 armor weights thing does not affect profits, because they sell each weight seperately. The whole 9 months estimate also assumes making all 3 weights, and does not count the manpower of the gemstore team, since the gemstore team is not currently working on armors. Also, there may be a decent amount of people who use outfits, but that doesn’t mean that they will keep buying outfits. Since oufits cannot be mixed, there is less incentive to keep buying additional ones once you have a good amount of them.

Sure, armor sets will cost more to make even with all that I said above, but there is some merit to making them, especially once player outfit wardrobes saturate.

Ayrilana.1396:

HoT maps may have been smaller when viewed from the world map but they had considerably more going on within them than core maps.

True, but some players like to explore larger zones, that also have less mob density. Personally I don’t mind the HoT zones, but I still believe that having a variety of different zone structures is best. Having every new zone be a dense meta map can get repetitive if done too much. These kinds of maps also compete with each other for players who want to choose a meta to run at a certain time. If you introduce too many, you will dillute the population too much to complete some of them. In HoT release every single map was a dense meta map, which was a mistake in my opinion.

Haleydawn.3764:

Gaile Gray.6029:

A message from the PvP Team:

Hi all,

We’ve been monitoring your feedback regarding the temporary achievements included with the recent PvP map releases, and we wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to make those achievements permanently obtainable. In addition, we will continue to offer the achievements for Eternal Coliseum and will be reactivating those related to Revenge of the Capricorn in the future to give players another chance to complete them. Lastly, we wanted to let you know that we’re planning to introduce map achievements for each of the existing PvP maps in a later release. We’ll have more information on those as the time gets closer.

Thanks!

The PvP team

Oh look a suggestion I made a few months back has been granted. Thank the gods.

More AP for you guys that want it coming soon.

They are actually adding AP to content that needs it? That is definitely a step to the right direction.

Behellagh.1468:

MO has stated that it takes roughly 10 times the man hours to create a mix and match armor set, really 3 sets one for each weight.

With an outfit costing 700 gems while each of the three weights cost 800 gems. It’s easy to see at those prices that they need to sell fewer outfits to pay off the development costs than the three armor skins. The sooner it’s development is paid off, the sooner ANet profits from developing that new item.

I’m not sure where you got the 10x figure, but it is true that MO mentioned that armor sets are more difficult to make. Whatever the case, Armor sets have the mix and match advantage, which means that saturating the game with them is much more difficult.

Since outfits cover your entire body, you don’t need to buy that many, so their appeal gets lost quickly. The fact that you can’t save dyes on specific outfits does not help either.

I’m not a raider and I’m not going to pretend that I know everything about the game mode, but here is what I think about these current criticisms.

Blaeys.3102:

Where the issue started

Attempting to expand your playerbase is a good idea, as long as it doesn’t significantly impact the game for the core audience. However, the major shift in HoT was not that raids were implemented, it was the open world HoT maps themselves. Raids are meant to be side-content for a minority. The problem is that the new maps had many drawbacks, like enormous initial HP requirements, timegated metas and many areas that are outright inaccessible during specific times. All of these elements made the new maps anti-casual.

Blaeys.3102:

Playstyle diversity and the road to boring play

Raids simply exposed the balance issues that were there in the first place. Balance in this game is pretty bad, and the the primary problem in raids seem to be the profession specific buffs. Druid, Berserker and Chronomancer not only have the best unique buffs, but they also have the highest amount of unique buffs as well. Build diversity has suffered in all game modes because elite specs shoehorned professions into specific builds. As more elite specs are added it is possible that more professions will get desirable buffs for raids. However, the system that Anet created is incredibly inflexible at the moment

Blaeys.3102:

Broken storylines

I watched the recap of the raid and I didn’t feel like I missed much. Sure, I wouldn’t mind experiencing the story in some way, but it seems to be an insignificant storyline that was only made so that a raid can exist.

Blaeys.3102:

Watering down non-raid content

They haven’t watered down non-raid content as far as I can tell. Yes, the sloth boss is very undertuned but I don’t think that every single boss that gets introduced should have the same difficulty. As far as I remember the fights of the first to LW2 episodes were pretty easy, so having easy fights in the first two LW3 episodes doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for me. Also that final blob fight’s difficulty is highly dependant on your profession.

As for guild missions, it is true that they stopped working on them, but I doubt that it had anything to do with raids. They probably thought that making more of those is a bit redundant due to their reward structure. They were also working on other guild-related content instead, like guild halls and decorations.

Blaeys.3102:

Fracturing the playerbase

Raids were inevitably going to fracture the community no matter how they were implemented. When you introduce what is essentially a new game mode, some players will play it and some won’t. If Anet introduced a GvG mode, it is likely that there would be fractures in the PvP community. Some people would refurse to play the mode, while others will play it and possibly abandon some of the content they used to do.

Basically, I believe that the issues with raids stem from Anet’s general design of the HoT expansion, rather than the design of the raids themselves. An example that is very relevant to me is legendary armor. I feel dissatisfied that legendary armor is raid-only, but what is it that makes me feel that way? Is it jealousy because raiders get a shiny? I would say that it is not.

I simply feel like Anet is wasting resources on this project. They may have a small team working on raids, but how much armor development is being wasted on raids when HoT barely added to the variety of armor sets? Oh, but you see the problem is that Anet barely added any armor sets, not that raids are getting an armor set. Even if non-raiders got 1 more armor set, it still would be small amount for an expansion. The same logic also applies to the content drought, when players were complaining about the lack of content. An easy mode of raids simply wouldn’t add much content, because the raid maps themselves don’t seem to have much in them.
People need to keep in mind that when compared to other games, the raid release schedule is kinda slow. They are definitely not focusing on raids. Anet needs to make sure that the next expansion has the correct amount of content, or raids will continue to be the scapegoat. After all, it is easy to blame a game mode that minority plays and label it as a worthless addition that drained too many resources. Though in my opinion, the true pointless resource drain the WvW desert maps. Almost no WvWer liked them, and Anet had to spend a bunch of dev time on fixing all the WvW stuff that they broke. I hope that Anet has been organized properly this time, and are ready to make a good expansion that hasn’t been rushed.

nanael the angel.2659:

Will have to agree totally with the OP, Heibi.4251 here.
I do not care about AP but I would not mind getting the skins faster. For me and many others coming from gw1, gw2 is all about cosmetics and dressing up your character, and I am tired of having a bunch of people with an awful lot of free time at their disposal, and insecurity issues dictate how everything should be almost unattainable by the general player base, just so they can keep their self-imposed bragging rights.

Removing the daily AP cap would make long term AP rewards even more unattainable than they are now. This is because players who are not at the cap now have no way of catching up. Sure, they may be able to get all of the current rewards eventually, but then Anet will have to add new ones and at some point those will be unobtainable for anyone who doesn’t log in every single day.

The only way to get around this would be to make it so that there is a catch-up mechanism, or else you are trading one form of exclusivity for another.

uknortherner.2670:

I’ve said it from the start – this should have been a visibility toggle like the shoulders, gloves and helmet. After all, several other MMOs manage to do this without any problems and this was something I remember being asked for even in beta all those years back, so it’s ridiculous that it’s come to this.

I looked at the prices on the TP. Truly a fine example of the Emperor’s New Clothes (Shoes?).

What truly horrifies me is the thought of how much the price of this simple toggle option will rise when the next expansion comes out and nobody is doing TMs.

DoctorDing.5890:

obastable.5231:

Boosters value is 100-150 gems, approximately 30g.

ToT value is currently around 5 and a half silver, or less than 1 gem.
.

Boosters are worth precisely nothing to players who do not use them because they can’t sell them. They just clutter up their bank.
So, to me, a ToT bag is worth more. But it still does not make it worth buying keys…

In the end banking it forever is a choice, and it usually happens because people are not sure when the best time to use a booster is. However, even if you pop a booster randomly and play normally without trying to maximize its effect, you will probably still get more value from a booster than from a ToT bag. Boosters are better no matter how you slice it.

But the thing is that the seasonal item is not the real replacement of the boosters. The 4th slot is the booster replacement, so you now have a chance of getting something rare instead of a guranteed booster. It also sounds that there will be an item in the seasonal slot all year, instead of only on holidays, which is a minor bonus.

I’m not really sure if the chests are better with the booster replacement, but I’m not about to use my keys yet, since I want to see if the next seasonal item is better than the ToT bags. Also, the whole thing with the removal of almost all nodes bothers me a lot.

flog.3485:

Ganathar.4956:

flog.3485:

Ohoni.6057:

I like the out of combat version just fine as a standard armor style, and I like bits of the in-combat version too, although some of the spikes are a bit much. The nice thing is that we won’t be locked into an “outfit” version, so we can just wear the bits that we like, and leave out the bits that we don’t.

I say that hypothetically, of course, since the only current way to earn them is by raiding a lot, which makes them a complete non-factor in my playing of the game, but I retain hope that they’ll announce more options for earning them.

Personally, I wouldn’t want the leg armor to be accessible through other means but let’s optimistic, if Anet developed the tech for pieces of armor to have an animation, don’t you think it would be possible for them to realease skins in future LS updates that have a combat/off combat animation tied to it?

I think that we will be lucky if they release an armor set at all in LW3, let alone an animated one. I only have issue with the envoy armor because Anet releases armor sets at a glacial speed. If they released armor sets more frequently, I wouldn’t mind if there was a larger amount of exclusive sets than just this one.

I don’t know, I just expected more than 3 sets for every weight in an expansion release.

I never wanted to imply a whole armor set in one LW update. That is the thing we should be suggesting giving an armor set or a piece through multiple LW updates or even they could implement a recipe that make an armor set have an animation for example.

That is what I understood. I simply do not think that Anet will make an armor set for the entirety of LW season 3. Some time ago they posted on reddit that armor sets are hard for them to make, and that they will mostly be from expansion releases. I think that it was in one of the AMA’s.

flog.3485:

Ohoni.6057:

I like the out of combat version just fine as a standard armor style, and I like bits of the in-combat version too, although some of the spikes are a bit much. The nice thing is that we won’t be locked into an “outfit” version, so we can just wear the bits that we like, and leave out the bits that we don’t.

I say that hypothetically, of course, since the only current way to earn them is by raiding a lot, which makes them a complete non-factor in my playing of the game, but I retain hope that they’ll announce more options for earning them.

Personally, I wouldn’t want the leg armor to be accessible through other means but let’s optimistic, if Anet developed the tech for pieces of armor to have an animation, don’t you think it would be possible for them to realease skins in future LS updates that have a combat/off combat animation tied to it?

I think that we will be lucky if they release an armor set at all in LW3, let alone an animated one. I only have issue with the envoy armor because Anet releases armor sets at a glacial speed. If they released armor sets more frequently, I wouldn’t mind if there was a larger amount of exclusive sets than just this one.

I don’t know, I just expected more than 3 sets for every weight in an expansion release.

Heltzer.2435:

Has everyone forgotten that VG was cleared in greens and there was just recently a 3man Clear? Granted these were done by very skilled players but it shows that player skill, dps rotations, and build/comp that work well together is more important than gear. Gear just increases the margin for error…which is a good thing too but not everything by no means

You can only get that skill in raid fights by actually practicing them. If you want to practice them, you will have to start with an optimal comp and with optimal gear setups, since you will need every advantage until you get the hang of it. This means that for the majority of the playerbase, who haven’t done much raiding, these kind of clears are not relevant at all.

After all, the players who 3-manned VG weren’t even close to that capability when they did the fight for the first time. Also, with the nerfs since then, it might not be possible to 3-man VG anymore.

LucyFurr.6589:

i can’t wait to have my engineer get his legendary butt cape trench coat armor, just because….medium armor is whack and if you don’t buy gemstore armor, you will cry.

Try getting the PvP and WvW medium armors, they are not trenchcoats.

WvW could use a legendary armor set, instead of other types of legendaries, for a couple of reasons.

For one, backpacks are already in both fractals and PvP.There are also 2 generations of weapons as well, with one being exclusive to OWPvE, but the other being outright buyable in the TP. Pretty much, no type of legendary is exclusive to one mode, except for armor.

The other reason is because stat swap is most useful in WvW, while legendary armor is the only type of legendary with multiple pieces.

The only caveat would be that the armor would have to be different to the raid armor.

I’m not too fond of this armor set, especially with the over-the-top spikes. If the other legendary armors are as uninteresting to me as this, I will be glad that I never got into raiding. Having said that, it is a type of armor that will appeal to some players and having different armor designs is always a good thing.

My only real problem with this armor is that I suspect that animating it took lots of resources from armor design. I wonder if non-raiders got 1 less armor set just because of the animation work. This isn’t to bash raiders, because it wouldn’t be a problem if we had a decent frequency of armor releases to begin with.

Whatever the case, I hope that the precursor is exactly the same as the out of combat version, so that raiders can use that armor without all the spikes if they want to.

Blipp.5206:

The new elites for the Engi and Elementalists are game changers. For Engi you have the Sneak Gyro, which dramaticly changes how an engineer is played. You pop in and out of stealth while attacking, which is a big boon to the scrapper play.
As for Rebound you guys haven’t played raids have you? If you did you’d know that Rebound is game changer in some of the boss encounters there. Gorseval springs to mind where Elementalists use ‘Rebound’ and allow the squad to survive the massive aoe from Gorseval, while delaying CC, so they can phase him in place, without moving him and using updrafts. Just because some of those skills haven’t changed the way -you- play, it doesn’t mean they didn’t changed the way other people play.

That’s great and all, but I think that ele complaints are justified if the only decent elite skill that they have is good in raids only.

jheryn.8390:

I don’t disagree. I’m not sure, however, that Anet intended for Elite Skills to be vastly more powerful than other utilities. IMO I think they just wanted them slightly more powerful or unique.

Some of the mesmer’s elites are not game changing powerful in PvE but they are unique and fun. Different than their other utility skills. That is what is lacking IMO.

To many of the other professions skills aren’t that much different than other utilities and therefore don’t feel very “elite” because of this.

Glyph of greater elementals comes to mind, which is nearly identical to the glyph of lesser elementals utility.
I believe that elementalists are the worst offenders when it comes to bad elite skills. The biggest gem is definitely tornado, which even after the buff from last patch, is still considered to be the 50% risk of slotting elixir X on your engineer. If slotting utilities in the elite slot was an option, I don’t think that any elementalist would ever use an elite.

draxynnic.3719:

That’s a valid thing to consider from a PvE perspective. Staff fire is already one of the best specs if all you want/need is DPS. Unless staff ele gets (further) nerfed in PvE, it’ll be hard to make an elite spec that outdamages tempest in PvE scenarios without making it the go-to in raids and other high-end PvE.

From a PvP perspective, though, there is room for a more selfish, damage-oriented elite specialisation.

PvE does have room for an Ele DPS elite spec though. As new mobs tend to get more and more challenging, you would expect the slow nature of staff to greatly hinder it in a good portion of the newer content.

Also, skill can only get you so far in terms of survival when you have almost no active defenses with the lowest HP and armor in the game. Which means that if enemies get even harder, ele will need a DPS spec with damage that can land more easily and with improved active defences.

Ohoni.6057:

But also balance, that it wouldn’t be fair to give one class four times as many abilities as anyone else gets. Remember, Ele only launched with a total of three weapon sets, while most launched with six or more. If they keep adding one weapon per expansion evenly, then an added offhand is already more than a two-hander for another class. Again, I don’t see them ever adding a new two-hander unless a) they skip them on weapons entirely for the previous or subsequent expansion, or b) they restrict elements so that the new Elite spec can only use one or two of the elements. That’s just my assertion, sure, but I believe it’s based in a reasonable logic.

This does not seem to be the way Anet does elite specs though. If you look at the first wave of elite specs, you will see that there is an enormous variation in the amount of new skills that professions get.

All professions get the standard elite + healing + 4 utility skills, but when it comes to weapon skills and profession mechanics Anet is not afraid of giving some professions a much larger amount of skills.

Mesmers only got 2 weapon skills and 1 shatter with Chronomancer.
Necromancers got 5 weapon skills and 5 new shroud skills.
Elementalists got 8 new weapon skills and 4 overloads.

As you can see, chronomancer only got 3 skills that are not elite, healing or utility. Even though tempest had to get at least 8 skills for a weapon, they still gave it an additional 4 for the profession mechanic. Sure, you could argue that it is because the profession mechanic was overloads, but they could have chosen a different mechanic that didn’t need that many skills. That tells me that they really wouldn’t mind choosing a weapon with more skills if it fits the theme.

Besides, I would like to think that in the next expansion they will be capable of making elite specs that have a higher amount of abilities on average. HoT was an expansion that they didn’t have much time to prepare for, because they weren’t initially planning to make expansions. In addition, the profession team had to make Revenant from scratch as well, which potentially took development resourses from elite specs.

Ohoni.6057:

In fact, we already have a precedent in this very thread. Pre-HoT, many people considered that not having a weapon that really shined at long ranged was part of how guardians were balanced against other professions. Now, dragonhunters have longbows, which break that rule.

But they already had Scepter, which was good at long range until they nerfed it. I don’t think “bad at range” was ever a Guardian balancing trait, the Guardian balance is that they are boon-reliant, and boon stripper/corruption can do a number on them.

And even putting all that aside, a max range of 600 would still allow for standoff capability while having true melee options.

Again, if they’re reasonably effective at 0-600 then we’re right back into Dagger’s wheelhouse, which would be redundant. Keep in mind, while other classes may have multiple weapons covering similar roles, these weapons only take up three moves in their kitten nal, while an Ele mainhand involves twelve, twice as many as any two-hander. The four dagger sets account for four different weapons for any other class, so even a 5th “good at 0-600, but mostly closer than that” weapon set would be redundant. As I said, I could see them adding a few, 600 range moves to a melee sword, all decent CD on them so they would be more situational than bread-and-butter, but I don’t see them adding enough that you could hang out at any distance and reasonably contribute. If you can do both decent damage at middle distance and brutal damage in close, it would be too much, even if you had to swap attunements to get there.

Ele is one of the highest DPS classes and they already do it at range with staff, there is no way that Anet would make a pure melee weapon that can do significantly higher damage. If that happened, Ele would be the only DPS profession in raids.

If the new weapon had melee at all it would be on some of the skills, and perhaps the benefit to the new weapon would be that the skills are faster so that they can actually hit players in PvP, instead of doing extra damage. Melee skills would be as strong as staff skills or maybe slightly stronger, while ranged skills would be weaker than staff skills.

nicknamenick.2437:

TheFantasticGuy.7206:

nicknamenick.2437:

Fancypants.9705:

jeez no patience …

….

We have been waiting for 2 months now (if next week then 2,5)

its fine if they give 4 big balance patches per year but they also need to do smaller updates in between.. Anet is just way too slow on this for 4 years now.
and even with the big balance updates they just shift the meta around and be done with it. thats what Anet does.

Yes, that is exactly what Anet does. They shoot towards cyclical imbalance. Once you understand that they, the developers don’t want the game to be perfectly imbalanced and you understand what cyclical imbalance is, the way the Devs have balanced GW2 makes the absolute sense.

So you watched a youtube vid about perfect imbalance? good for you.

I recall that video mentioning that games which utilize cyclical imbalance well, tend to have a vast amount of different characters that fluctuate in viability, like LoL. The problem here is that there is a very limited amount of builds that flactuate in viability. With more elite specs that could change, but right now cyclical imbalance seems to make for a stale game in every game mode.

Also, if the rumors are true, the next balance patch will focus on WvW. Expect stuff like boonshare nerfs. I don’t think much will be fixed in PvP in this patch.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Ganathar.4956:

They simply pay no attention to useless skills and traits, that could keep the game interesting, by causing players to experiment.
.

Yes, they do, though not as much as they should. The one thing that made guardians to from terrible to “please nerf them, mama Anet” in PVP were reworks to scepter and sword, for example.

It certainly doesn’t feel that way, because the only changes that make non-meta stuff viable seem to be reworks for a couple of weapons of a single profession every 6 months or so. Within a 6 month period all non-viable weapons should have had significant changes. To be fair, they have tried with ele scepter a bit, but it hasn’t been near a rework. The skills are still as sluggish as ever, and no matter how much they buff the skills, it will never be good in competetive play if they don’t speed them up.

Rauderi.8706:

Tigaseye.2047:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

It already exists. It’s called Perfect Imbalance. Its ever-changing effects helps keep the game interesting.

~EW

You should be a politician.

Or, actually, you shouldn’t – we really don’t need any more of that type of whataboutery.

Imbalance isn’t “interesting”, it’s just bad design.

Um, actually…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

Unfortunately, Anet does not follow the perfect imbalance concept at all, in any of the game modes. This is because it is always the same builds that rotate in and out of meta. They simply pay no attention to useless skills and traits, that could keep the game interesting, by causing players to experiment.

You could argue that they are going for cyclical imbalance, but that simply requires an enormous amount of characters or builds that are somewhat close to viable, if the game is to remain interesting.

I believe that the sustain of the elementalist is a non-issue for the next elite spec. Yes, base elementalists used to have decent survivability if they got defensive stats pre-HoT. However, those capabilities are not good at all now without tempest because of the power creep. If they introduce defenses that are not dependant on stats, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Also, part of why ele has high DPS in raids is overloads, so a DPS elite spec needs to have something that will give ele equivalent damage to those, that is less risky to use.

More single-target skills are not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it is our new weapon that gets them. A new weapon with single-target skills will be way better for mobile damage, because there will be no huge delays, which seem to be a trade-off for our AoE. If you want AoE, just pick any other weapon, we have tons of that.

I would prefer if if our new weapon is ranged though, because damage ele has trouble surviving even as ranged. They would need to cram lots of defenses to make melee DPS work.

Managed to solo it without dying on a glass fire staff ele. I hadn’t looked at the achievements at all beforehand, so I wasn’t prepared. What proved challenging was that I had to keep all of those mobs in my AoEs while avoiding them. I think that it would have been much easier if I was using fresh air, and could just move around spamming overload air in melee.

As a daredevil, you have more dodges so you shouldn’t be having major issues clearing this. Though it is true that different professions have a different time in this fight. I am sure that the fight will be very easy once I get my necromancer there. Maybe this means that certain professions need some elite specs that can help them in solo encounters, if Anet insists on making them more difficult with new releases.

I mean, if you want to make a true solo challenge for something like a necro, you basically have to make it almost impossible for some other professions at this point.

Dadnir.5038:

Well, it feel like ton of work for the devs.

The only thing that I fear with your spec is that there is basically no survivability at all, only damage, damage and more damage. I think you’re mistaken about something, the elementalist doesn’t lack damage at all, the elementalist lack the ability to safely land it’s damages. That’s why most PvPer complain about the fact that they do no damage in PvP, they feel forced to play defensive traitlines and defensive gear. And your E-spec/idea keep the elementalist in this kind of gameplay… Well actually, from the look of it, it would be even worse since I’m not sure that the spec is viable in PvP even with 2 purely defensive traitline and tanky amulet.

So, In short, The idea feel good (even if it the workload on the dev is huge) but the global viability of the spec in PvP is lacking (0 survivability).

Yup, hard damage mitigation is the number 1 priority for a viable ele damage spec in PvP environments. However, I would argue that part of the reason why ele damage is low is because ele skills are the most telegraphed in the game. The only other profession that is comparable is necro in death shroud or with GS. The new weapon needs to be much quicker, except if the devs are willing to shave the casting times + delays of most scepter, warhorn and staff skills.

Many damage styles have weaknesses though. Confusion and retaliation are not that good against opponents with slow abilities. Burning doesn’t work against destroyers. Slow attacks like lava font and meteor shower are the opposite of torment, as they are horrible against moving targets. What makes torment so special that it needs to change?

Astralporing.1957:

Behellagh.1468:

And at 39K, it’s virtually unattainable. Don’t you need like nearly every AP currently available in game to get it? Maybe that’s the point. Only those who get nearly all the other achievements, plus the 15K from dailies only deserve to get it.

It’s not “virtually” unattainable. It’s flat out unattainable, there’s not enough available APs in the game. And at the current rate it might be years before the first person gets one (seeing as Anet gives out less and less APs for achievements).
Daily AP at least offered a steady path towards those skins.

Haleydawn.3764:

The reason the cap was put into place was because people didn’t want to log in every single day for 10AP to stay ahead on the leaderboard

No, it was because they didn’t want to do every possible achievement each day to stay ahead. Which took too much of their precious time.

That reason no longer exists.

You do have a valid point about the backpacks being unreachable, but the solution is not more daily AP. The solution is simply adding more AP on the newer achievements. The LS3 achievs so far have been very underwhelming in terms of AP.

If they increase the cap, then they will have to keep making rewards for the limited amount of people who do dailies every single day, and I believe that dev time can be spent in better places.

Lyp Sao.1375:

Can we cap the max gold? I can’t catch up with the big players

I think the AP cap has no logic at all.

Gold isn’t time gated though, you can grind it as much as you want. If dailies were repeatable as much as you want, whenever you want, then it would be the same.

Dailies should never have been a source of AP, because they aren’t even true achievements. If the cap is removed, one-time achievements will be devalued and there will be less motivation to complete them, especially some of the collections and the new ones that don’t give much AP.

The cap should either stay where it is, or increase proportionally to match the AP of discontinued achievements. Simply put, AP from discontinued achievs should count as daily AP. I don’t think that locking the highest achievement rewards behind discontinued achievements is good design.

Rauderi.8706:

tobascodagama.2961:

FrizzFreston.5290:

I’ll be pleasantly surprised the day ArenaNet developers dare to test the waters again. For now they seem irrationally scared of it.

It’s a pretty rational fear, I’d say. Very few people actually like the underwater content as it is.

It’s because ANet did a half-effort of underwater combat (and it was still better than any other MMO’s underwater experience), but they abandoned it instead of fixing the half of skills that didn’t work underwater. I doubt anything short of an expansion will provoke them into doing the work necessary to finish what they started.

Not only do many skills not work underwater, but your trait setup might become useless too. They should seriously have a seperate tab for selecting traits to use when underwater.

Danikat.8537:

I sometimes think I don’t mind outfits, but it’s only because I use them in a very specific way, which works with the options we have.

The only two I’ve bought are the Noble Count and Wedding outfits, which work as single pieces (especially on female characters where they’re dresses) which I wear as an alternative to armour when my character is in town for a while or on special occasions. For example when we have to go to that party during the Season 2 storyline, I switch to one of those so my character looks less out of place.

I don’t think I’d buy any of the others, both because I don’t like the full set and because all outfits share one dye scheme. It’s hard enough finding dyes that work across 2 different ones, I can’t imagine trying to make it work across 5 or 6, certainly not 25.

(I’m still annoyed about my pirate costume, which I bought back when it was town clothes – I used pieces of it on 3 different characters and really liked the looks I got. I think I’ve used it once since it was changed to an outfit and it just didn’t look right. I got it refunded but it still bothers me.)

Mea.5491:

The weird thing about outfits is that other MMOs have them, they are usually not even recolorable yet people are happy with them. The reason why we don’t like them in GW2 is because first we had armor transmuting (+ gem store armor skins) and that cool system was basically killed (or “slowed down”) because of outfits. If we got outfits from the beginning, no one would complain.

“Mix-n-match” has spoiled us, lol. I only have one outfit and I use it on my lvling characters to hide the ugly gear but I would never wear them at lvl80, I prefer my own unique look. And yes, I would like to see new armors but I’m afraid it’s not gonna happen anytime soon.

I was thinking this.

I play Elder Scrolls Online as well and they have pretty much exactly the same system – armour is obtained in game (although you can buy the ability to craft new styles) and their cash shop sells costumes which are identical to outfits. They’ve only just added the option to dye outfits (and only for subscribers). And yet everyone there seems happy with the system, or at least they don’t complain about it.

Maybe because they also don’t have any kind of transmutation system so although there are a lot of armour skins your choices are relatively limited (you wear the one/s that provide the stats you need and accept whatever they look like) and dyes have to be unlocked through achievements so there’s less customisation over all. Maybe people are just used to picking from the options and accepting the end result, instead of being able to make their character look exactly as they want. (Or almost exactly and then getting frustrated with the one thing that doesn’t work.)

They also never had anything like the town clothes system – which was the precursor to outfits and did allow you to mix and match them.

(Incidentally ESO also makes no attempt to accommodate tails, if your character has a tail it just clips through their clothing, end of story. Never seen anyone complain about that either.)

I haven’t really dabbled with ESO, but doesn’t that game have the typical MMO gear grind? Part of the issue with GW2 is the issue of rewards. GW2 substitues the gear grind rewards with cosmetics and new stat sets.

creepyXtina.2560:

Ganathar.4956:

This outfits vs armor skins really gets to me sometimes. After much analysis, I have come to the conclusion that their no armor set policy for the gem store does work to an extent, even though I previously thought otherwise. HoT released with only 3 armor sets for each weight + mistward, which was a pitiful amount for an expansion. However, they have added triumphant and envoy armors, for a total of 5 sets + mistward, which makes it a bit better.

In the years leading upto HoT we got the same amount of sets from in-game means, but that took almost 3 years. Now if you include the gem store armors, the amount goes up to eleven (I’m not including the reskinned flame armors), which is still not an amazing amount for the time frame. Basically, I don’t think armor set production has gotten slower because of outfits.

What I do think though, is that Anet churns out way too many weapon sets, especially when you consider the black lion weapon sets and the random gem store weapons that come out all the time. They might not be too difficult to make, but they make so many of them so quickly that it really saturates the game with them. If they were to change something in regards to their skin releases, I believe that the best course of action would be to cut weapon skin production in half and put some extra effort into outfits and armor sets. Of course I could be wrong here, but I do believe that the weapon skins are getting out of hand.

Some of the weapon skins in the Gem Store are skins from gw1. But yes, I agree, ArenaNet canceled the development of the new legendaries. instead they are bringing out new full Black Lion Weapon Skins every 2 months or so.

And if they say it takes too much time to create new Armor, why do we get so many new outfits? It doesn’t even have to be a full L-M-H Armor set, there are also separate Armor Sets like Viper’s Medium armor and Phoenix Light Armor skin and its much more worth it to wait 3 months for one armor set than getting trash outfits.

The only conclusion I get from this is that ArenaNet needs something to make regular money with: Outfits and Black Lion Weapon Skins.

Black lion weapon skins are extremely bloated at this point. I honestly wouldn’t mind if the gem store devs took a break from those, and just made a couple of black lion armor sets or something. Since chest and leg armor is so difficult to make when compared to other skins, they could just charge twice the tickets for those particular pieces.

I’m just brainstorming here, because I know that Anet won’t be drawing their gem store recources and transferring them to more in-game stuff. They also want to release new Black Lion Chest content regularly, to keep those chests selling. If they slow down Black Lion weapon production, they will want to replace them with something.

As for the outfits, they are simply easy to make, because they are single skins and have no clipping issues. However, they should at the very least give you the option to wear head skins with them.

This outfits vs armor skins really gets to me sometimes. After much analysis, I have come to the conclusion that their no armor set policy for the gem store does work to an extent, even though I previously thought otherwise. HoT released with only 3 armor sets for each weight + mistward, which was a pitiful amount for an expansion. However, they have added triumphant and envoy armors, for a total of 5 sets + mistward, which makes it a bit better.

In the years leading upto HoT we got the same amount of sets from in-game means, but that took almost 3 years. Now if you include the gem store armors, the amount goes up to eleven (I’m not including the reskinned flame armors), which is still not an amazing amount for the time frame. Basically, I don’t think armor set production has gotten slower because of outfits.

What I do think though, is that Anet churns out way too many weapon sets, especially when you consider the black lion weapon sets and the random gem store weapons that come out all the time. They might not be too difficult to make, but they make so many of them so quickly that it really saturates the game with them. If they were to change something in regards to their skin releases, I believe that the best course of action would be to cut weapon skin production in half and put some extra effort into outfits and armor sets. Of course I could be wrong here, but I do believe that the weapon skins are getting out of hand.

FrostDraco.8306:

Lets look at PvP – Ele has very little active mitigation, low armor, low hp, and high healing power scaling with low base heals.

Stab, constant protection, invulns, projectile reflect, and massive self healing when in water. You could argue that you can’t use some of these things when you are stunned. But when you are not, you have the toons to survive. Ele is a squishy class tho, no argument on that.

Your post is way too long for me to bother with replying to everything, but I just wanted to talk about this bit.

Ele stability is not anything amazing really. If you don’t use armor of earth, you only get stab from overloads if traited, which nobody uses just for stability. Stability is there because they have the longest casts in the game, and leave you vulnerable by giving your attunement a 20 sec cooldown.

Constant protection is not a thing unless you spec earth. As soon as you spec earth, you are no longer capable of being a damage-focused elementalist.

Also, ele barely has any blocks, invulns, and the ones that they do have are on massive cooldowns when compared to other professions. I think that only necromancers are worse than eles in this category.

You are spot on in terms of projectile reflect, this may be the only decent defense damage eles have.

Massive self healing is not a thing if you are a damage dealer. Ele heals scale a lot with healing power, which means that the base heals are pitifully low. The total healing of a damage ele is barely higher than that of a thief. Damage DH completely blows damage ele out of the water in this depatment. Pun intended. Also, eles need to attune to water, which makes them completely incapable of applying any pressure.

I do agree that protection, reflects and healing can be great. However, you have to bunker up both with traits and stats, if you want them to work properly. This was essentially Senario’s point as far as I can tell.

I don’t think that it is currently possible to add any meaningful survivability to DPS elementalists, without buffing bunker tempest survivability or filling the game with even more lame passives. We simply need to hope that the next elite spec will take care of the issue.

If you try to add survivability to utilities or weapons, they can simply be utilized by tempest bunker specs to make them more survivable. If you add survivability to the air and fire lines, it will probably lead to more passive play, because traits are usually involved in passive play. Also, sustain is not that great if you instantly die to burst, so active mitigation is way better for damage builds.

Dragonhunter sustain doesn’t work just because it’s superior to that of damage ele, it works because the guardian already has a bunch of active mitigation to avoid some of the burst. Tempests do have 40% damage reduction from protection, which can sort of substitute for active mitigation. However, a damage ele cannot get much protection coverage, because most of it is in the earth line. Also, like all other tempest defenses, protection gets better with more defensive stats. When you have more effective health due to your healing or your vitality, protection affects a greater amount of health. Blocks, invulns and dodges have no relation to your health pool though.

Danikat.8537:

Neurion.4086:

In all honesty, GW2 is in desperate need of some sophisticated designed, elegant armours, because most of what we have now are sort of chunky, especially the heavy armour boots. Oh the horror!

I’d love some trousers for light armours, and mid or full length coats, or even long assymetrical male skirts, for medium – is it only me who finds the male Sneakthief set to be, by far, the best looking armour?

…and the gem store team should start thinking about creating more sets with separated parts, like the Viper set they gave us some time ago. I don’t understand this obsession with outfits.

Anet said about a year ago (maybe more) that they would not be releasing new armour sets in the gem store because players complained that too many were coming out that way compared to in-game.

Instead they make outfits (which used to be town clothes), which are also easier to produce because they can make just 1 at a time instead of needing a heavy, medium and light set to come out together and they don’t need to be able to mix-and-match the pieces, so they also don’t need to worry about making sure they don’t clip with every other outfit.

It was a classic case of Anet missing the point. Players thought that maybe Anet could tone down the amount of gem store armor sets, so that they can work more on armor as in-game rewards. What happened instead is that Anet shifted their gem store devs to the creation of outfits, which means that there are less armor sets coming out nowadays, since the rate at which in-game reward armor sets are being released is basically unchanged.

I get that they need to make money, but in-game rewards are an important aspect of the game, that keeps people playing. If the rewards are always the easier skins to implement, like weapon skins, minis and backpacks, there will be a saturation point. There are only so many weapon skins you can use. On the other hand, there are way less pieces of chest and leg armor to compete against when makng new ones, and armor pieces are great for mix and matching too, which makes them more difficult to get tired of earning.

I’m not sure if downsizing the gem store team would be a wise desision though at this point. In my opinion they should hire a few more skin designers instead, and make them work on in-game rewards. Maybe thay can also abolish the no armor set policy of the gem store. It obviously has done nothing in regards to what the players really wanted. I am sure that there would be plenty of happy customers if we got some gem store armor sets, instead of only getting outfits.

Kageseigi.2150:

phantom.1675:

Yeah, that’s the point. It’s an ELITE skill, what are you expecting?

As a Thief, I feel left out :-(

Elementalists feel your pain. We have been asking for an actual ELITE skill for a while now. What this thread is about, seems to be the GW2 equivalent to first world problems. Who cares that your great elite can get countered, when some professions don’t even have one decent elite?

Supreme.3164:

@David Ortiz

We also looked to normalize elementalist damage and healing a bit more, as their overall potential to do both at the same time was considerably higher than was healthy for group compositions.

And that must be why now we have druid with bristleback and smokescale, then dragonhunter with symbols/trappers

They have more personal sustain than pre-nerf ele and this give them the chance to focus more on support, on top of this they have more dmg..way more dmg than old cleric ele.

Despite all the bullcrap the esl tools say with their lists, the elementalist on general spend 70% of the time running around trying to kite for its life..the remaining 30% of the time he will try to “heal” his allies with melee range aoe heal and share boons that do absolutely nothing against the condi meta

On the other hand we have profession that can both melee and range at the same time, this goes both for offense and defense…and still have better self-survivability

I mean..you devs, say that tempest damage and healing was too much..then leave druids and dragonhunters behind after the patch….

Are you actively trying to treat people like idiots or what?

I think that this change was because of raids. Supposedly, raids wouldn’t negatively affect the rest of the game, but we can see how that turned out with balance changes such as this.