Guild Wars 2

Still eagerly awaiting the arrival of these skins, I’ve wanted them since launch. I got really excited when I saw these in that update, but alas the only change they’ve received was their names being changed to Quetzal Weapons. Please, Annette!

Agreed, despite the best efforts of those who understand how it works, the event always seems to go one way – counter-clockwise, starting from the Ogres. I’m on Blacktide, and I’ve done the event a few times guesting on Seafarer’s Rest.

Before it starts, there are people in map chat trying to organize everyone into groups. Then someone pops a commander tag and everyone heads off after them, with one or two people heading to individual bosses. They usually fail or give up and the zerg begins to slowly progress around.

I’m starting to think I’ll never achieve anything other than bronze unless I luck out and time my attempt while a large guild is doing it. I realise a solution to this would be to join said large guild and find out when they’re doing the event, but as shown here: http://youtu.be/98YSue1OCG8 even that isn’t always an option as you might not be able to get into the instance with them.

If there was some way that the event’s mechanics could be explained, then everyone would at least be able to try for gold. Maybe through NPC guide characters that all go off at the same time to fight each boss, doing minimal damage and are easily downed. They’d serve to show that all bosses need to be dealt with at the same time, through in game dialogue just before the event starts maybe? I dunno, bit late now anyway.

My point is, you go into the pavilion and when the event starts, the bosses spawn and you’re told “Defeat all the Queen’s Pavilion champions. The faster you kill them, the better the rewards”. Logically, more players on one boss means higher burst so faster kills, which is obviously not how it works thanks to scaling. This has the adverse effect of making the bosses child’s play for organised guilds and a pain in the kitten for zergs who end up fighting demigods at 4fps in a sea of twilight/sunrise particle effect trails.

If ArenaNet want people completing this content at gold level, they need to at least hint at how they want the content done. There’s nothing to suggest this to the average player, who’s making his way through the content without a guild. I’m just grateful that the meta-event didn’t require you to obtain gold tier completion.

I was having a thought about builds earlier today, and specifically traits. It’s not such a big deal in pvp, since it costs nothing to retrait, and you can do it at any point in the heart of the mists.

However, in pve/wvw, you need to find a trainer and pay them in order to change your trait lines and thus your build. I think content might be more fun if you could change your traits, armor and weapons via tabs on the hero panel – meaning you could that having multiple setups available to you at the click of a button, so you can contain a build within a tab and switch traits without visiting a trainer.

I’m sure this probably isn’t a new idea for most of you, I haven’t played many mmo’s, I’m just suprised Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have this. Players could adapt to fill multiple roles in dungeons, and would make strategies for clearing them a lot more interesting. I’d thought maybe make them available for gems and badges of honor for pve/wvw content, and maybe sell them in pvp for glory to make it less hassle to switch between builds and re-input traits.

This would potentially open up loads of new ways to do content both solo and in a group, and would also give players more insentive to play wvwvw, at least to get more badges for tabs.

It’s too much of a hug box, they’re afraid they’ll scare the devs off if they put too much pressure on them for answers. We need Dontain on one month, that’ll sort them out. This is supposed to be about discussing the game, and criticizing bad decisions comes with that territory yet nobody seems to do it.

I personally love SOTG, and how it outlines both what the devs want to do with the game and what the community want to see. My one problem with this last episode was that necro, mesmer, ranger (classes represented by guests in the video) all got quite a lot of discussion as to what was good and bad about the class, what changes they’ve liked in the past and what they’d like to see. Then, other classes that weren’t rep’d were hastily outlined (and in our case almost forgotten!).

I can’t blame them for caring about their main – we all do. I care about my main, and I just feel that eles were only discussed in as much as “phoenix is now possibly too fast” and “fresh air is really powerful”. While I don’t disagree with those statements, it ignores our fundamental flaws such as little to no active defense, certain trait lines being horrendous (I’m sure we’ve heard all these before so I won’t rattle the rest off). I’m not too bothered if our powerful set-ups get nerfed (within reason) so long as we get what we need in return. In fact, I’d be happier becuase this sort of stuff would encourage build diversity.

I highly doubt Jon would go away from that thinking “Maybe ele’s ARE op, we should nerf them some more” as he seems clued up on balance and the meta – but there’s always that risk when you don’t have a chance to make your voice heard. When you’re representing a community, you need to put across that communities opinions and not just from the point of view of a necro or mesmer. There are so many great threads on here giving ideas on how to fix ele and while the devs probably read these posts, it’s nice to get some feedback on the suggestions and they don’t seem to post here very often.

SOTG is a great opportunity to talk to a dev about where we’d like to be this time next month or the month after. Grouch, if you’re reading this, I loved the idea of having all 8 professions rep’d at the next SOTG – everyone gets a say then. Please make it happen.

EDIT: Oh, and yeah, get this guy on. I’m sure he’d have some interesting questions to ask, and you said you were looking for a warrior grouch http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=r3F_ZcvR-pg

This might go some way to explain why arenanet are taking their time and nerfing the overpowered classes slower now. Given the mess the ele is in after the kneejerk nerfs in the BWE, I think they’ve realised that nerfing multiple aspects of a class all at once can have unforeseen side effects. It’s not a nice place to be, because trying to justify buffs in damage is difficult when we’re dominating points just by sitting on them in pvp and wvw.

The class feels like it could do with changing a lot of things. For starters, trait lines. If you want to do damage, you put points into fire, or for a crit build you put points into air. Then you pick traits, but now the problems start arising. Almost all the traits, both major and minor in fire, only help you when attuned to fire. So if you want to go glass cannon and you put 30 points into fire, when you switch out for a combo or because your skills are on cooldown, you may as well have empty trait slots. There is hardly any synergy between the attunement lines, and for a class that relies heavily on all of them this feels a little backwards, like it’s hindering you. It’s like this for most of our traits in all lines, the only one that has proper synergy is arcane.

As it goes, I feel slightly forced some of the way into arcane to even be viable in the first place, as we have to do with 4 weapon sets what other classes can do with one. I like the idea of swapping, I just wish the cool-down wasn’t so long on both weapon skills and the associated attunements. Fire grab for instance, an offhand dagger skill. I agree, during bwe1 we had too much damage on it to justify the low cooldown. But to bring both damage down and cooldown up made the skill underpowered.

If anet are looking to get people to stick to one or two attunements (versatility opportunity here, more options for people to look at, not asking for them to make this the only way to play), then maybe the more you trait into a certain line the less time that element should take to cool down, sort of like majoring in an attunement or two.

I’d also like to address those who have said in the past “learn to play”. I am open to the fact that I’m not a master of this profession, not even close. But rather than saying simply “learn”, how would you suggest to other players go about learning? Playing the class longer? are there videos and things we should watch out for? I feel like I know what I’m doing, but if everything you’ve read here is complete rubbish, please feel free to point me in the direction of the nearest guide – and I’m not talking, these are your skills, and this is what your traits do. I can read the tooltips for that. I’m talking strategy, engage, situational stuff that helps out when you’re not just fighting one trash mob. How all your skills interact, not just “here’s one combo now piss off.”

And finally, damage is something that I feel needs to be looked at. I know what you’re thinking – “oh boy, here we go, someone else crying that their class isn’t warrior tier”. Well I’m not asking for 100 blades damage, just a bit of a buff for our glass cannon builds. For a squishy class with the least base vit/tough in melee range with d/d, trash mobs should not take as long as they do to take down, I’m taking too many hits. I’m not a demigod player, I’ll be the first to admit that. These great players maybe make up 10% of the people playing this class, and just because they can play the class well doesn’t mean it’s balanced. They could play any class and make it look good. I’m talking about the majority of players who picked the class because they either played it in GW1 or liked the sound of the description, and now need to be thrown a bone because balance takes into account how the good players are playing.

Some say that this class is rewarding, and I’m right with you on the fun part. But balance shouldn’t be about each indiviual class and how fun it is, it’s about how classes interact. If this was a game where all the classes dealt damage as fast as an elementalist, sure, this class would be great with some bug fixes. But as it is, the other classes deal so much damage, and with auto attacks no less – meaning we have to step up the dps somehow, whether that be through damage, trait synergy or builds other classes can’t pull off.

I’d like to hear other people’s opinions on pve experiences, as well as wvw and pvp. Does anyone disagree with any/most/all of my points? Anything to add or change? I’m quite tired, so there might be things I typed out wrong or didn’t mean in a certain way, so I’ll correct this as I re-read it.

Thanks, and sorry for it being such a long read!

I’d like to start off by saying that this isn’t going to be me whining for paragraphs about how I’m going to re-roll as a warrior because I can’t faceroll hundreds of mobs. There are lots of people complaining about eles, but not a lot of them go into enough depth, and some haven’t even played the class. I like to think that while my main is only lvl 52, I’ve played the class for long enough now to know how to play the game, at least in pve.

I wonder about the Elementalist as a class. It’s definitely unbalanced, but not necessarily underpowered. Sort of lop-sided if you like, great in some areas but lackluster in others. On the GW2 class page, the class is described by arenanet as such:

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

If there are any devs or forum staff that can answer this, I’d really like to know where you want the class to be in 6 months to a year’s time, and if this is still an accurate description. You mention the ability to inflict massive damage with a single attack, suggesting the class was originally intended to work as a glass cannon specialising in one or two attunenemts like the weapons of other classes. In reality, the dps of each individual skill leaves a lot to be desired, and I think that the class is definitely meant to be a damage dealer through attunement dancing and multiple moves. This was at least the case during the BWE1, if you didn’t get a chance to play them then here’s a small taste of the damage a combo could do:

That beautiful 14K crit damage. Then damage got nerfed to oblivion on certain useful spells and utilities, and our dps dropped dramatically leaving us where we are now – throwing points into water/earth in order to stay alive long enough to pose a threat. However, don’t take this the wrong way, we’re far from useless. When a bunker build is played right the class is almost unkillable by less than 3 people. Daphoenix posted up a video on his guide showing him in two consecutive 4v1 skirmishes on wvw, using a bunker d/d build and not being downed once.