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Can I do those things on my elementalist? Yeah.
Would I ever want to do those things on my elementalist when I could do them with far less effort on any of my other toons? No.
Please, Isila. To use another option is just out of the question! Common sense? What is that?! Let’s fundamentally change the game instead!
I just wonder how many store managers these kids are bothering when they try to push the pull door and it doesn’t work.
It’s like… take the Hills keep in the border lands. You would have to be mentally deficient to try to get into that keep by ramming and meleeing the door at a HUGE tactical disadvantage (what with the whole ‘being on top of a hill shooting down at the only approach’ thing) when you could just build trebuchets at the supply camp north of it and take out the near walls.
Rams and melee attacks on the front gate are not the only way into a base. The walls have HP bars for a reason.
They can take out catapults nailing enemies at the gate right around the same time they put in defensive parapets that make sense. The LoS issues defending the front gate from the walls are ridiculous.
Wait.. so a bunch of server transfers that result in an extremely even and close match is a showcase of the “problem”?
Yes, it’s a showcase of the problem.
I like that the match is more even now, seeing as I’m on IoJ as I have been since beta. What I don’t like is how huge of an impact population numbers and server transfers have on Wv3, and the drastic swing in how this matchup is playing out is the proof in the pudding. ET wasn’t stomping us because they were better at the game, they were stomping us because they flat-out had more people round the clock.
Wv3 needs some serious design passes to fix it so that the server that wins is not always the server that has more bodies to throw at the maps.
I don’t understand this thread…
From what I read – You feel the class on its own is “ok”, but when compared to the other classes it falls short?
And that this is somehow -your- fault and not the class itself?
If this is indeed the point you are trying to put across, all you need to do to get your answer is read other topics in this here “Elementalist forum”.
What the OP was saying was that Elementalist as a class is okay if considered in a vacuum, as if it was the only class to play.
This is true. You can get things done with Elementalist, if you know how to play and you play well. The problem is that there are other classes in the game, and every one of them outperforms Elementalist while simultaneously requiring less effort and skill on the part of the player. The only way that Elementalist stands out as worth using over any other class is in the combo field department, which is honestly not a great place to be — a class that excels at buffing everyone else’s stuff in a game where everyone is self-sufficient by design. They don’t need the Elementalist to function.
This week’s matchup is a pretty big showcase of what’s wrong with Wv3 currently. Last two times we had this ET/CD/IoJ matchup it was two separate week-long curbstomps on ET’s part, leaving with almost twice the score of CD and IoJ combined. This week it’s a neck-and-neck race because ET lost their massive 24/7 coverage to fair-weather server hoppers.
Hope ANet fixes this ridiculous crap soon.
Morale in WvW - Get rid of that scoreboard and incentivize playing, not winning!
in WvW
Posted by: Isila.2574
But the score does matter. Part of the bonuses you get are extra HP, better healing, and faster endurance regen. Orbs give even greater boosts to stats. These things affect combat, they make it harder to win when the top world outscores your world significantly. They make your return on investment worse. It becomes harder and harder to successfully siege facilities held by the winning team, you end up having to spend more to do it. But the reward doesn’t scale with the cost.
Morale in WvW - Get rid of that scoreboard and incentivize playing, not winning!
in WvW
Posted by: Isila.2574
Why on earth would I spend gold to lose a match I have no chance of winning?
Until ANet can provide a decent answer to this question, WvWvW will have this problem.
Because spending your gold in a match you are winning or losing in are equally as pointless in the long run since they mean nothing?
In the end, nothing means anything. That’s irrelevant.
Gold in this game can be used for a variety of things. At any given point a player has to make a decision as to where their personal supply of it would be best spent. For a lot of those players, spending it to accomplish nothing in WvW is not a good proposition. Not with how little of it there is to go around in general. If a player’s world is losing badly, this affects their mental calculus: If I spend a gold on siege equipment, what is the likelihood that I’m going to see any benefit out of it? If we’re getting stomped by the other two servers, chances are not good. So why waste the gold?
You may not like it, you may not agree with it. But that’s what goes through peoples’ minds when they see that scoreboard, and that’s why your world gets demoralized. Hiding information isn’t going to change that, it’s just going to make people stop playing entirely because it’s not worth the risk.
Morale in WvW - Get rid of that scoreboard and incentivize playing, not winning!
in WvW
Posted by: Isila.2574
Why on earth would I spend gold to lose a match I have no chance of winning?
Until ANet can provide a decent answer to this question, WvWvW will have this problem.
Yep, speed boosts do not stack, the game only uses the best one.
Which renders a number of Elementalist traits worthless because you can trait multiple speed boosts, none of which apply to you because they’re overwritten by other boosts.
Welcome to being an Elementalist, Working As Intended.
Yawn. Another week, another matchup for IoJ to beat whichever legitimate tier 2 server they’re matched against and get zergrolled by whichever tier 1 server couldn’t quite make 24/7 coverage last week.
Really wish ANet would do something about timezone-based population imbalances. Really sucks knowing that nothing you do matters because the T1 server’s eurozone crew is just going to ghost everything before the next day rolls around.
I prefer Carrion gear for D/D and S/D. Power, Condition Damage, Vitality. Condition damage is a large part of your damage with those weapon sets because of how easily you keep up burning and bleed.
Sorry everybody, there was a bug with some updates to the filter. Please continue to report any bugs you find here in this thread. The most fun bug has been corrected at this time.
It’s not a bug with individual words, it’s just a preposterously overzealous filter in general.
You can’t use ‘quickly’ and ‘to’ next to each other because of the last three plus the first one. That’s not even a swear (at least not in any version of English), it’s a horrible misspelling of a part of human anatomy.
You can’t say that something took place 1.5 weeks ago, because ‘half’ and ‘ago’ are just one whitespace-and-context-ignoring filter away from getting kittened.
You can’t just ignore context and whitespace and do a blanket search for character patterns like that.
Magnetic Grasp, too. Don’t even use it at all because I can’t afford to gamble whether or not I’m going to end up CCing myself for several seconds at a time, just hanging in the air unable to do anything or launching myself past the target and into whatever ugliness is on the other side.
There was a post here on the forums a few weeks ago (either removed or lost since then; hard to tell with the spartan search options on these forums) that took in-game numbers with various levels of Healing Power and got the 10:1 and 20:1 ratios, only one of the skills (can’t recall which) got anywhere even close to 1:1. I haven’t focused on healing since trying it a month and a halkitteno similar results, maybe ANet changed it since then. That would surprise me.
Water is not for DPS, it is for support. Healing, condition clearing, and spamming vulnerability stacks with Shatterstone. If you have a number of heavy-hitters in the group (Warrior, thief, etc.), you’ll probably get more mileage out of stacking might to the gunwales and then spamming SS to get lots of vulnerability stacks up on the target so that the others hit even harder. Elementalist DPS is pretty lame in comparison.
If you have your heart set on doing DPS though, your best deeps with S/D usually comes from spamming rock shards in Earth. Gear for condition damage and power and just keep spamming rock shards to keep the bleed stacks high. Churning Earth when it’s up to burst out some damage and put even more bleed on the target. You do not have to be close to use Churning Earth; you can use Lightning Flash (utility) while channeling CE to teleport and take your AOE with you.
When doing group stuff with S/D, I swap fire to start up the might stacking combo (4, 2, 3, Arcane Wave) and get some burn on, then switch to earth to finish (4, 5) and then start spamming Rock Shards/Rock Barrier. If I’m group with a lot of heavy-hitters I replace the DPS filler with Shatterstone spam.
@ Isila:
A) It’s more about the water field they provide which in turn can get you 2-3 combo finishers of AoE Healing, which will heal you for a generous amount.
As I said, a quick burst once every 30 seconds or so. The fields have to be up for you to combo off of them. Staff only gets Earth 2 as a natural blast finisher, throw Arcane Wave on there for combo #2. But Arcane wave, again, has a 30 second cooldown (24 if you trait for it). Building around water is nice for the gimmick of having a good healing burst every 24~30 seconds, but people die in this game in a matter of two or three seconds from full HP, so it doesn’t actually help all that much.
B) It’s not the best stat to be fully specc’d into, however it is not a useless as you state – on my Support guardian I had around 1k healing power and each of my heals went up by about 600-700, now consider how many heals/regens the class has and then you realize that is isn’t that bad. Healing in this game is more about mitigating the damage as apposed to keeping yours and allies HP bars at full at all times. Though it is a matter of opinion and play style.
You may have noticed, but this is the Elementalist forum, not the Guardian forum. Guardians may get something useful out of healing power, but Elementalists do not. The math has been done, it is not arguable. For stacking thousands of healing power you get a couple hundred extra HP out of your spells, meaning that the people you’re healing get overkilled by slightly less when that warrior or thief rolls up to them and gibs them in under three seconds.
I’m not talking a couple hundred per tick of regen, I’m talking a couple hundred TOTAL over the full duration of the regen boon. You’re not mitigating anything that you weren’t already mitigating with 0 in healing power.
Staff is more direct damage than conditions, so for staff you want to focus on power. You don’t really have good access to bleed and burn (your only source of bleed is a long-windup AOE spell in an attunement you don’t really want to sit in for long periods), and your main damage comes from meteors and fireball which are direct damage that don’t burn.
For D/D or S/D, condition damage becomes much more important because you stack a lot of bleed (earth spam attack stacks bleed) and have easy access to keeping burn up 100% of the time. I use carrion for non-staff builds.
We have an entire element devoted to healing and water combo fields. Spec into a little healing power and profit.
A) Too bad that that “entire element” is good for a quick burst once every 30 seconds or so, and useless the rest of the time. Geyser is too small, even with blasting staff, to be particularly useful in most situations where people are constantly moving to avoid damage. Healing Rain has a huge cooldown.
B) Healing power is an awful stat. People have done the testing on it, it gives returns as awful as 20:1 (20 Healing Power required to heal 1 more HP) on many skills. Stack 2000 healing power and you will heal for 200 more HP; in the BEST scenarios (4:1 on one or two skills), healing for 500 more HP. Too bad you’re getting hit for 3000+ per hit by warriors and thieves.
(edited by Isila.2574)
Short answer on how to make good money in GW2 is that you don’t. The people that have tons of money come in four basic flavors:
1) Bots
2) Precursor exploiters
3) Mass gem purchasers/converters (tons of money to blow IRL, current conversion is about $2.50 per gold)
4) TP Bots (or might as well be TP Bots)
Everything in terms of raw materials or drops is dirt cheap on the TP at this point in the game (1 copper over vendor price, etc.), and the margin on crafted items over raw materials cost is razor-slim. The only real way to make money legitimately right now is to dedicate yourself to being a TP bot; snipe people that have more scruples than to undercut by 1 copper (buy their legitimate lower price item and resell it for 1 copper less than the next lowest), or take the coppers-to-silver margin on crafted items and just deal with it by mass-manufacturing crafted items.
TL;DR GW2’s economy is godawful.
(edited by Isila.2574)
You really shouldn’t be surprised by this. Rift had the exact same promise of “dynamic” game content and an “ever-changing world”, and it was all well and good until you realized that rift locations were static and there were only so many types of rift event in each zone/element.
Same thing with GW2’s dynamic events. They’re impressive the first time, but then you get used to it and you know that Event X spawns at Y location under Z conditions.
It’s really ruined Orr for me. I avoid the place like the plague and do my T5/6 material farming in Frostgorge Sound whenever feasible because of the disgusting, permanent throng of people (and bots) perpetually farming the Penitent/Sheltered/Jofast corridor events in Cursed Shore.
T3 cultural armor is purely paying for fashion. If you like the look and that look is worth 120 gold to you, pay it. If not, don’t.
Good thread and well reasoned arguments unlike the imbeciles posting in the official thread in the crafting section.
Disagree on these points:
- In my opinion, having the precursor be a random drop from the forge adds a great deal of mystery and specialness to the items. If there were set recipes, then people would know exactly what they require and I think that would ruin that feeling. I like the mysterious feeling but at the same time I dislike the rng aspect that causes it so I understand your reasoning very well. However I’d rather keep rng and not have a set recipe.
- It has only been a month since the game launched and even less since people started trying to get precursors. The price should stabilize shortly.
- Players with a legendary are currently positively received and that is not going to change.
- You keep saying you want to be tested with skill. You have to differentiate farming for karma, badges, tokens, whatever, and skill. Farming for x materials is much closer to farming the gold for buying the precursor than it is to a test of skill. So just say you want a set recipe.
- A real test of skill (killing a hard boss) will definitely be too easy. This is fairly obvious if you think about it.
There is no mystery or specialness. Everyone who has any interest in legendary weapons already knows the ‘recipe’: Gamble four level 75+ rares/exotics of the same type. That’s all it is, raw gambling. It encourages botting in the worst possible way. It is bad, and should be changed.
1) Crafting before level 80 is not profitable. There are so many other ways (drops, karma, map rewards) to get good gear pre-80 that there’s no reason for people to spend money buying it from the TP.
2) Crafting at level 80 for anything sub-Rare in quality is not profitable for the same reason.
3) Crafting Rare+ items at level 80 has an incredibly slim profit margin. Ran the math on a typical item tonight, an Exotic ‘Carrion’ light chest. Profit margin on the completed item over the raw materials was all of 30 silver — and minutes later someone undercut it even further and the margin dropped to 15 silver. That’s what all the time and/or money grinding Tailoring to 400 is worth to you: 15 silver profit margin on items that require five ectos and five T6 Fine materials.
The economy in this game is awful, and a lot of it has to do with how ludicrously easy it is to mass-farm mobs in the Orr events. You don’t even have to bot to do it — although botting of course helps by automating the process for days uninterrupted, and many players do bot. T6 bones and venom sacs are going for less than a third the price of jute scraps, it is that bad. The only real way to make any substantial money in this game is to either farm bot, or TP bot.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the power plateau is so easy to reach. Everyone is kitted out in full exotics of the stats of their choosing within a week of hitting 80, meaning the only thing left for them is dungeon sets for appearance, and legendaries.
And of course, the absolutely preposterous grind required for legendaries just encourages botting even further. The sad thing is, everyone and their dog is going for their legendaries so they can look cool and unique, not realizing that it won’t be cool and unique when everyone and their dog has one.
At the very least, players should not be able to damage gates/walls, they should require siege equipment. If an opponent is determined enough and has great enough numbers, they can destroy maximum-upgrade barriers for zero cost, which skews the resource game heavily in their favor.
Lightning hammer is good for making your ranger buddy look good (they can abuse their haste and the hammer’s 1 spam).
Frost Bow is good for an incredibly gimmicky chill spam on some dungeon bosses.
Earth Shield is good for trolling WvWvW defenders by yanking them off of walls.
None of these things is worth sacrificing a utility slot and wasting time not being an elementalist for however long you have the weapon in hand.
Elementalist has a multi-minute cooldown that can revive a maximum of three people at a shot, assuming you’re even in the right attunement for it? Nerfbat.
Mesmer has a skill that allows them to teleport an entire army past any and all defenses of a fortified location? Legit.
Not gonna lie, Ascension Bay just a little bit ago in IoJ Borderlands was pretty cool (from the IoJ side). We eventually lost it as SBI had Redvale locked up and we couldn’t get any supply in, but it was pretty neat watching them get through the inner gate, then get pushed all the way back out past the outer walls, then push back in for round 2 — and this time bringing more siege to correct the mistake they made the first time.
Earth 2 does a pretty decent chunk of damage when it explodes, and puts up a hefty stack of bleed which does a lot more if you’re specced for condition damage. That said, its primary use is as a blast finisher for combos, so yes, the idea is that you drop it and then flip to another element (usually Fire) to lay a field over it so that the combo finishes when it goes off. Handy for doubling up on Might/Swift/Regen AOE bursts with Arcane Wave, or even triple-taps with Evasive Arcana.
If your concern is that any enemy that’s not remarkably stupid will just move out of the big obvious mound of rocks, well, welcome to being an elementalist.
You can cast two rounds of ice shards during the recharge period of Shatterstone.
Shatterstone is not about doing damage, it’s about stacking Vulnerability, which increases the damage the target takes from subsequent attacks. The value in using Shatterstone is to have partymembers or teammates wail on the target while you spam Shatterstone to stack its vulnerability sky-high so that it takes a ton of extra damage.
Staff is a terrible weapon for soloing; everything it has is very slow and most of what it has are ground-target AOEs that are awful for soloing mobs with.
Try Dagger/Dagger or Scepter/Dagger. You get more control and survivability options that way.
Don’t understand why you’d take Fire Shield on Signet Use when you only have one signet, and it’s a signet you will ideally never use (you can get more healing by spamming skills through attunement cycling and emptying your utilities than you will get by using Signet of Restoration actively).
Perhaps you find more use for auras generally, but I find that their duration (and the duration of the boons you get off of them through traits) is too short to be viable as a group support thing. I do take the aura boons for solo exploring because they are good solo, but if your goal is to be support-y there are better ways to do it (like staff builds).
For group support sorts of things (dungeoneering or group exploring) I prefer scepter/dagger. You don’t lose anything in terms of combo fields (MH dagger doesn’t have any other than Burning Speed, which is awkward to use for combos), and while your healing does go down a bit (Water Trident isn’t quite as good as Cone of Cold), it’s not really a big deal. In return, you get much better sustained damage (via Stone Shards), better debuffing utility (Shatterstone stacks vulnerability much better than Vapor Blade), and get to be a tad better at non-staff elementalist’s main support gimmick (that being Might stacking) because you get four blast finishers in your weapon skills to use on Ring of Fire rather than three.
D/D is better for soloing though, as it’s more bursty.
You may feel superior, but that doesn’t make it so. Yeah, you’ve got a ton of abilities, and you can chain them together into this big, extravagant sequence that looks really flashy and neat — too bad a warrior outperforms you by pressing 2.
Take the classic S/D Updraft→Dragon’s Tooth combo. You go into air, use Updraft to knock the enemy down, then flip into fire while you’re in mid-air of the Updraft animation to crank out a Dragon’s Tooth — looks flashy and, hey, now you land that nice damage DT that you would never land against a target that wasn’t floored. Great skill combo, right?
Or you could have just rolled a class that lands attacks that do the same damage as DT without having to do all that attunement-swapping, CC-applying setup.
…I find myself using ALL the skills to stay alive.
This is what the class was designed to do.
Rather than swapping tactically between the elements…
This is not.
Changing the attunements that drastically would change the class at a fundamental level and make it something completely different. If you’re interested in a tactical role-changer, you’ll have better luck campaigning in the suggestions forum for a new class in future expansions. Which sounds like a good idea, actually.
The class needs to be changed at a fundamental level, because it is fundamentally flawed.
At its core, elementalist has to juggle 20 skills at one time instead of 10. But elementalist is not allowed to be more effective than other classes (in fact, most of the time it is LESS effective than other classes). So it gets twice as much work to do (juggling 20 skills instead of 10) and gets no reward for doing so, because that would be “imbalanced”.
Elementalist, as a profession design, is inherently flawed. If individual elements were worth staying in for long periods (as the trait lines try to make it appear), then switching between them would be overpowered because of the synergy. If individual elements are not worth staying in for long periods and frequently switching between them is required (as it is now), then traits focusing on elements become largely useless because you can’t stay in that element for any length of time. A big problem right now is that elements don’t really have any meaning on their own; Fire is focused more on damage, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it and DPS. Earth is more focused on defense, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it to tank hits. Water is more focused on healing, but not enough so to make it viable to stay in it and focus on healing things. Air just sucks outright and is only ever used because certain key control/buff skills are in it.
A lot of this stems from how skills in general work in GW2. Everything is based on cooldowns. Most classes only ever have 10 skills available, so it’s expected that they’ll resort to spamming their autoattack, and their power reflects that. Elementalists have 20 skills available, and to balance the possibility of flipping attunements quickitteno blow through four sets worth of cooldowns in rapid succession, the autoattacks are sub-par and the cooldowns are balanced so that quickly chaining them is as powerful as other classes, rather than more powerful.
Which results, ultimately, in the problem we’ve all talked about for ages: in order to compete with other classes, Elementalists have to play harder. Because they can blow through 20 skills rapidly, they have to.
Edit: Seriously ANet, this word filter is preposterous. When placing the words ‘quickly’ and ‘to’ next to each other gets kitten-ized because the last three letters of the former plus the first letter of the latter, minus the space, forms a bad misspelling of a naughty word, you have problems. Fix your freaking forums. And then fix our freaking class.
(edited by Isila.2574)
Well, you show me a build that works better when in a zerg then. Oh wait, yes. Yes, you can’t, because DPS is the only thing you should be doing in a zerg, and DPS is the one thing an ele does better than any other class when it comes to AoE.
Not to mention if you time your lightning field correctly, they won’t even be able to roll out of your lava font in time, much less the meteor storm, unless they use their stun breaks… Which means they won’t have them cooled down on the next push.
Oh and, meteor storm has a 24 second cooldown and lasts 15 seconds. That is a 62.5% uptime. Lava font is even better at 66%. What cooldowns are we talking about again? Oh yeah, just enough cooldown for the enemy to try and use their battering rams on the gate again, this time with their escape mechanisms on CD.
And those people hang back, letting their escapes recharge, while the folks that didn’t use their escapes come up to take their place. Most stun breaks have less than 60 seconds of recharge. This is all assuming, of course, that you actually have position to channel the full cast of meteor shower from a spot that has LoS on the enemy side of the gate and that they’re not doing the smart thing and spamming that part of your walls with arrow carts and other siege.
Again, it works great if you’re fighting idiots. Not so much when they actually have a clue what they’re doing.
Glyph of Renewal can only be used to rally downed allies.
Glyph of Renewal takes over 4 seconds to cast.
So the question you have to ask yourself when deciding whether or not to put GoR on your bar is this: would it actually be faster to just click on them instead?
The answer is almost always yes.
GoR was already highly situational and just generally bad. Now it is worse than worthless because you are harming your party/team by using it when you could be using some other utility skill and just clicking on people.
Kills in wvw with the staff build depend a lot on luck and whether the enemy commits to a battle or not. For example, yesterday I only got like 30 kills in a whole hour of play, but 20 of those were in the course of a minute, when the enemy actually committed to attacking the gate (and thus ate the full meteor storm+lava font they were standing in, and all of the ones that didn’t roll out in the first 5 seconds died).
Ed: When battles happen on choke points (bridges/valleys), you’ll also be able to get loads of kills if you time your meteors correctly.
Pretty much. Staff is great in WvWvW when you’re fighting idiots that stand in fire. Any enemy with two neurons to rub together, however, will see the big lava font on the ground or meteors raining from the sky, dodge roll back out, and laugh at your cooldowns.
I’m sorry, but builds who’s strategy boil down to “stand in your zerg and hope the enemy is too stupid to target you” aren’t ‘amazing’. They’re trash.
it would reward skilled players for juggling their attunements better.
You mean pressing F1-4 mindlessly right? It would be a powerful buff, but it wouldn’t be the best way to ‘fix’ things.
On a side note, if you’re good with Evasive Arcana and Arcane Blast, you can still get to 15-19 stacks of might if you’d want to.
Don’t even need those. Scepter/Dagger, Ring of Fire→Dragon’s Tooth→Phoenix→Earthquake→Arcane Wave→Churning Earth. That’s 15 stacks of might right there, 16 if you’re traited to gain boons on attunement switch. 18 if you have Sigil of battle.
Too bad that even with 18 stacks of might Elementalist still does mediocre damage compared to other classes.
Just in case anyone forgot it’s there, check the stickied bugs thread at the top of the board. Read the two or three full posts full of bugs, many of which are pretty crippling for this class.
And with that in mind, wrap your brain around the idea that making sure our underwater damage was crappy was more important than fixing any of those.
It also makes me worry about this drop rate punishing people who don’t go straight DPS.
Why would you worry? Absolutely everything else about WvWvW punishes people who don’t go straight DPS, so badge drops aren’t any different.
It’s okay, Whirlpool got nerfed. There’s your balance.
You don’t need to be able to see your character, or not have your RTL make you a sitting duck while that Veteran whales on you when it fails to launch. Nope, you need to do even less damage, that’s what you need.
This right here is the whole crux of the outrage you’re seeing in this thread. Did whirlpool need a damage nerf? Yeah, probably, and I’d have been okay with that happening.
You know what I’m not freaking okay with? That damage nerf taking priority over fixing serious issues with this class that hamper its effectiveness.
Whirlpool is a long cooldown ability that is only usable in uncommon circumstances. Nerfing its damage should not be taking priority over having Ride the Lightning or Magnetic Grasp actually work at all.
Gloom and doom! Elementalist is so terrible! ArenaNet obviously hates us!
Seriously, guys? Whirlpool was OP, and our water stuff is actually pretty decent for CC if you stance dance fast enough. Signets not hitting behind us just brings us in line with everyone else. The glyph probably needs some loving, though.
On the plus side…
“We’ve updated the camera to reduce the amount of camera smoothing currently in the game in order to lower the frequency of related bugs. We’re still looking into other camera issues, but we decided to make this quick change because it greatly improves the gameplay experience.”
We’ll have to see what this does, but this may help dramatically with targeting a lot of spells. If this does what I think, D/D will benefit greatly (fire 2/3/5, water 2, maybe earth 3).
No. Earth 3 will still see us spending a lot of time hanging in the air next to an enemy doing nothing like idiots while we get wailed on, Fire 3 will still not actually go towards the enemy you have targeted, but rather where you are moving instead. Elementalist is still going to be broken in some very fundamental ways, but at least it’ll stop killing people underwater.
It is ludicrous to be applying nerfs to this class, when it already has to attunement dance and pre-plan to excessive degrees to get anything done — meanwhile the warrior standing next to you is just drooling over his 2 key and outperforming you when his saliva completes the circuit. Glyph of Renewl nerfs, are you freaking serious?
Can I have my skill points for Glyph of Worthlessness back? Renewal was already a poor choice for a utility skill no matter what your situation, now you are actively harming your party/team by using it — you could have been using that cast time to just kittening walk over there and pick them up from downed, rather than watching them die while you wind up a spell that will ultimately do nothing.
Good work on the Whirlpool nerf. Given that we have absolutely no choice in the matter of whether or not to use it as an underwater elite, can we have that slot unlocked to use normal utilities? Something that’s not trash? Please?
With all the problems elementalist has right now, it’s pretty great to see ANet making it even weaker. When the kitten are you going to fix warriors facerolling with Greatsword 2, eh? What’s that, never?
The only thing that I could say is annoying is the amount of effort needed to take mobs on compared to other classes, but I don’t really feel as kittened as everyone makes it out to be.
See, that’s the thing that we’re all complaining about. Why should one class have to work so much harder to get the same results as other classes? Why should an elementalist player have to attunement dance and plan out combos well in advance to get the same performance as a warrior player who just smashes the 2 button on the keyboard? That’s not balanced.
The problem with 3-team games is that they balance out assuming that each team is in it to win the overall match. Strategically, the best move is for 2nd and 3rd place to team up against 1st place to increase their chances of coming out on top by dragging 1st place down with their combined strength.
But what ends up happening is that most gamers are interested in feeling good in the now. Overall strategy to come out as the top server a week from now is trumped by stomping a weak, easy opponent and feeling good about it now. This is compounded further by rewarding individuals for individual moment-to-moment performance. It is far more rewarding for an individual player to kill more easy opponents now and get the individual rewards than for them to focus on destroying walls and siege equipment against a stronger opponent that will net them fewer kills in the short term. Their server may come out on top score-wise, but they will not be rewarded as much individually.
It’s understandable that it takes time to come up with proper code solutions to the problems WvWvW currently has with hacking, free transfer spying, and supply dumping. We all get that you need to come up with a way to fix it that doesn’t break anything else and doesn’t destabilize the game.
But until then, you are still ranking servers based largely on which one cheats the most during their matchups. Get some referees into these WvWvW matches. Hire a few interns if you need to, but these matches should be policed 24/7 by GMs that have the power to put hacked orbs back into the keeps they belong in, put supply back into the places it was dumped from, and do something to counteract server strategy being compromised by players that abuse free transfers to transfer to opponent servers and relay all their strategy to their home team.
WvWvW is the lifeblood of your game, it’s one of the main selling points. You should be doing more to prevent it from turning into a complete joke and losing all the players that care even one bit about decent sportsmanship.
Elementalist definitely needs work, as it is most definitely the case that we have to work harder than other classes to get the same results. But you should not be nearly dying on enemies in Orr, and it may pay off to revise your speccing a bit (gear revamping isn’t necessary, I do just fine in Explorer’s of the Pirate gear which has no defense to speak of in terms of either Vit or Tough).
I highly recommend, rather than spreading your points out as you have, to focus them into Earth and then another element of your choosing. Personally I Think Arcana works very well for both exploring and dungeoneering, but your mileage may vary. I do my general exploring in a spec like this using dual daggers.
The key idea is that Earth gives you a lot of toughness passively, and even more toughness when you shift into Earth attunement. Between it and Arcana, you get a free Armor of Earth and Arcane Shield when your health starts to drop, which helps to keep you on your feet; using your elementals elite in Earth mode takes more pressure off by giving the enemies something else to swing at that will last a while. Then there’s Glyph of Storms; when used in Earth mode it becomes Sandstorm, which spams blind on enemies, so you can create a safe zone to do your work in. Signet of Restoration gives you HP back for spamming abilities, and this combos very nicely with Water mode — cleansing wave to get conditions off of you and burst up a bit more health, Frost Aura to slow enemy attacks down (relieving pressure) and give you the aura benefits that you’ve traited for — protection (more defense), swiftness (escape speed) and fury (more crits to help finish off low-HP enemies).
And the build doesn’t lack for damage, either. With Fire 4 you put up a fire field, which you can then get up to three blast finishers on (and thus 9 stacks of might) with Earth 4 and 5 and Arcane Wave. Earth 5 hits like a mac truck all on its own, but even moreso with your damage boost in Earth (traited) and all that might you have rolling around from switching to fire (trait) and switching in general (sigil).
Make no mistake, you’re still going to have to play harder than that warrior did, and that’s still an issue that needs to be looked into with elementalists. But you can be just as effective in the end result if you play it smart.
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