Guild Wars 2

The Tequatl Spoon can’t go in the Mystic Forge.

It wouldn’t be surprising that they got the numbers wrong, but the damage was always pathetic. Fiery Greatsword is not a damaging elite anymore.

They deleted it so you new players wouldn’t be confused until later levels. Because they think that new players are complete idiots. They even removed mining nodes below level 7.

@dukevonart
Those are good points, and I don’t mean to distract from the overall message with either specific proposal. I had merely wanted to demonstrate the potential power level of RNG mechanics compared to what is there now, and I’m certain that there are other ideas that are better than what I can come up with, but I do still believe that actually relevant RNG mechanics should have a place. Keep in mind that these would all have to be traited for, so any Elementalist that doesn’t want to deal with them wouldn’t have to.

Fire Shield can only be set up while you are in fire attunement first, and the rest are all utility skills as I said already. Burn on crit is true, though that’s only an Adept trait, not a Grandmaster. That would be a good synergy though.

I would like cooldown refresh on burn, but a problem is that almost no Elementalist will have almost no access to burning outside of fire attunement, and the utility access they would have has a long cooldown. I also think there is value in having different attunement incentives to function differently.

I think I may have overshot the attention span of the forum, whoops.

In some PvE situations yes, staying in fire with Staff can be effective. But that is largely limited to fights where the enemy isn’t going to move much, which limits its use, and Staff is very ineffective in WvW roaming or in small skirmishes. It’s only once you hit critical mass of blast finishers in a zerg that staff becomes truly good in WvW (at which point it’s bonkers good).

Defensive abilities should be mostly in Earth and Water, I agree. However, the extent to which Water monopolizes the good ones right now is very bad for build diversity for the Elementalist, and ANet has a stated goal to increase build diversity. Burning Fire was changed specifically for that purpose, and so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that they want to retain at least some defensive abilities in every attunement (think Tempest Defense in Air)

Randomness is a double-edged sword in most games. In some cases it can result in a frustrating experience, causing a player to feel as though they lost due to the game rather than due to their own play or the play by their opponents. On the other hand, randomness can also add a great deal of excitement; StarCraft would have been a lesser game if not for the uphill miss chance forcing strategic positioning, Magic: The Gathering would be lackluster without the occasional absurd starting hand or miraculous top deck, and Dungeons & Dragons would fall flat without the potential for the dice to shake up encounters in unforeseen ways. In these ways randomness is good, as it forces players to account for many possibilities and to position themselves so that they can take advantage of openings without being overly vulnerable to unexpected pitfalls.

Players in Guild Wars are well positioned to be able to benefit from some elements of randomness. The fact that positioning and timing matter more than in many other MMOs gives players significant ability to manage the downsides of randomness and capitalize on the upsides. The Elementalist in particular is a prime candidate for taking advantage of randomness, as it has access to more total skills than any other class. And within the Elementalist’s kit the Fire Attunement is a logical and flavorful place for randomness to be a significant part of the playstyle.

Fire is unpredictable. One doesn’t know whether it will be readily contained or if it will flare up and burn any who stand too close. That flavor is currently literally applied in Flame Barrier and in One With Fire, both of which literally burn enemies who are standing nearby. However, neither trait is interesting, as the effect is both weak enough to not be worth playing around and uninteractive enough that there aren’t really any ways to play that could take advantage of it. Your weapons and your opponents weapons will dictate whether you are within melee range or not, those traits simply won’t factor in to how you play at all. Burning Precision the other RNG fire trait, and it similarly fails to change how either you or your opponent plays. I doubt that anyone has ever won a fight and thought that burning procs off of the trait changed the outcome.

So, my proposal, which is admittedly both difficult to implement and to balance, is this: make the Fire Attunement actually unpredictable. I’m talking significant changes. Makes Pyromancer’s Alacrity a Grandmaster trait and change it’s effect to “When you burn an opponent you have a 15% chance to refresh the cooldown on a Fire skill.” This gives incentive to stay in Fire Attunement by providing a way around our long cooldowns, and notably it actually rewards an Elementalist for favoring an attunement. As it stands now only Fresh Air breaks the generalist mold, and the Ele isn’t going to be able to have more build variety until it has more playstyle variety open to it. Instead of having a flat cooldown on Burning Fire, give it a chance to proc on any new condition applied, or redesign it so that you have a chance on condition application / when you apply burning / per condition tick to convert some number of conditions to fury. A 10% chance to remove 2 conditions and add 5 seconds of fury per removed condition would be really in flavor, and would reward good play by your opponent by letting them weigh the benefit of new conditions they might add versus the conditions already applied. It also would be a hopefully more viable alternative to Water traits for condition removal. Obviously these aren’t balanced as written, they would definitely need to be modified, but the intent I hope is clear: traits that are unpredictable in ways that impact how the game is played.

Edit: I had forgotten that they did listen when deciding to not move Renewing Stamina, so my post is not correct.

ANet’s got themselves stuck a little bit here. I strongly believe that it is true that making changes is difficult to balance and takes a lot of time to test properly, and I would be perfectly willing to forgive ANet’s seeming duplicity in putting up the thread on that account. Would, that is, if not for the sizable amount of evidence that ANet doesn’t actually test changes very thoroughly in many cases. The number of things that come through broken (be it runes, consumables, food, or playable content) strains the faith that them not listening to the forums is in fact for practical reasons, rather than for more cynical ones.

It is sad to see, there was a lot of goodwill when they first put up the thread and it definitely could have been a positive step, rather than the negative one it ended up as.

Thanks for being good sports tonight CD, VoX had a lot of fun running around being silly. Sorry if we caused any undue havoc, we were pretty caught up in things.

Iksargo.2640:

Diamond skin is incredibly broken and if it manages to get through (please no) it’s a huge buff to eles. Even without that, the current iterations of Fresh Air burst and tankier D/D are mostly being held back by S/D thief and hammer/longbow warrior. Both of those are receiving nerfs, which is the best buff eles could really get. Ele has never needed buffs, only the overpowered classes to be brought down. Of course Fresh Air is pretty broken from a balance perspective, and may finally be picked up by Anet’s nerf radar. Overall a great patch for eles, and again please no diamond skin.

You seem remarkably certain about Diamond Skin being good; unless they do lower the threshold to 85% like is speculated I don’t see how it’s anything other than garbage. There’s exactly one build on one class that would have any problem with it, and the manner in which the trait would encourage spending heals early opens an enormous liability for the class, it’s contrary to how the class tends to want to play.

This sort of thing is why devs ignore us. This suggestion is starkly broken, and it’s clear that no effort was made to prevent that.

I am finding it a little funny that people were taking Elemental Attunement over Renewing Stamina. Stamina is the easy choice between the two, just as EA is the easy choice is you go up to 20 points. This patch shouldn’t change a single thing about the value of Arcana. Hell, even if they got rid of Attunement Recharge Rate completely the Arcana traits are still way better than the alternatives. Fire remains a joke, and Earth remains very underwhelming.

To be honest, the most likely outcome is that this won’t change anything at all. None of the changes are big enough to ruin existing builds or make any new ones viable. Diamond Skin is just too situational to be relevant – in most cases it will do nothing, in some it will be slightly useful, and very rarely it will be a significant advantage. Choosing a trait that is only useful a small percentage of the time is a recipe for disaster. Frankly, the Burning Fire change is more interesting as an anti-condi trait, it has good strength against condition openings and only requires 20 points. It’s still not good enough to be the reason to spec into Fire, and sadly the rest of the traits are still awful for everything except for a Conjure build.

So really, the only thing that’s going to impact our place in the meta is the changes to the other classes. We’re going to have to wait at least one, and probably closer to 3, balance patches after this one before they sufficiently build off of the changes they started here.

Moonglum.4659:

DD ele may well be prevented from playing in WvW by this change to arcane traits, leaving staff only boring role to play. Most DD’s also switch to staff for WvW giving big variety to play. Positive suggestions:
Arcana 5,6,11 really needed to work together, with a choice of 5 OR 6 it does not work.
1. Please only move one of 5 or 6 to adept.

They are only moving 5 to Master. 6 is staying at Adept, so we’re fine.

haviz.1340:

Lian Olsam.9541:

Did u try full berserker ele in dungeons and fotm? With no points on water u have 11k hp at lvl 80 i play 0-10-0-30-30 and i have to be very smart and fast or i m death, i have to use 3 defensive utility or i m death… and this is my dps build… doesent look so much dps but a death one make 0 damage.. i ve played with other eles with more dps build and i ve spent my timeto ress him… i have also a war and a guard at lvl 80 war is zerk too its really another world… open the lfg tool and u will see lf zerk war/mesmer for any content ppl lf ele only for bow on ac… i play ele since bwe its my main class… spvp is different i know but dpsing on pve atm its freaking hard also with my defensive dps build. So this patch wont work on dps pve contents or u do some modify on build like i wrote before o u have to design the mob attakking differently or i will go to play war if i wanna dps and guard if i wanna give support on team… i dont wanna play ele support i want dps with him

Btw thanks for talking with us

You have problems surviving with 0/10/0/30/30?

He’s a liar, we shouldn’t pay much attention to him. If he has 30 in Water then he has more than the base health. Also, his argument seems to be that if full Zerker is viable on any class then it should be viable on every class, which is silly.

Robert.1086:

Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.

^This is a major error. I need to find a new class to play. No wonder no one wants to run staff eles any longer. Why the kitten would you do that? Why not just undo the few crumbs you threw us last balance update. Stupid stupid stupid.

Staff Eles are still stupidly good in WvW. They are probably the single most essential role in a Zerg. If you’re trying to use staff as a solo weapon then sure, you’ll have a bad time, but it’s never been viable while solo, this doesn’t change that.

Ok, a lot of you guys are being completely ridiculous here about the Ele having bad survivability. In fights over 30 seconds we are as tanky as any class. In fights over a minute we are the tankiest, period. Our healing relative to other classes is amazingly good, and that absolutely has to be factored into any discussion on how survivable the class is. That said, that goes away immediately if you don’t have 15 in Water and 30 in Arcana. The problem isn’t that we don’t have survivability, it’s that you have to lock up 45 trait points in order to get it.

Pyrite.9641:

Yes you are missing something.
The scepter/dagger combo is quite powerful with some condition damage gear.
My leveling build is s/d with water,air,fire,earth signets and FG.
An example PvE encounter without preparation would go something like this:
Open with DT
Ring of fire,
Switch to earth
Auto attack as long as the fire field is up,
Earth 2, for the extra armor and a later dps burst
Auto attack till burning is about to expire.
Pop fire signet to maintain burning.
Use earth three and air signet for blinds to reduce damage
Rinse repeat.

My build is fire, earth, arcane.

I’m sorry, but this is very bad advice. The scaling on bleeds and burning is pretty bad, and the signets are all awful. That rotation doesn’t include might stacking from Dagger Earth 4 and 5 or Arcane Wave. And even once you add all that you would still do more damage by just building power. Sure, in open world PvE you can do pretty much anything and still kill mobs, but this is a pretty inefficient way to do it. Condition Ele just isn’t a thing.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

To address the other player regarding his comments stressing the importance of making unappealing trait lines better; Burning fire and Diamond Skin are steps in the right direction. It’s a big patch and we are doing a lot of things for each class. *We only have a certain amount of time to make changes and it shouldn’t give you the impression that these are the only things we want to do. *

Excellent. That’s really all I wanted to hear myself. It took quite a while for the problems to be apparent, and it makes sense that it will take a while to fix them.

I frankly don’t know how to fix the problem. Simple numbers changes might succeed, but they are uninteresting and will likely only make the clkitten fun to play. Ideally we could find something like Fresh Air for Fire and Earth, perhaps relating to condition application or something of the sort. Maybe we could borrow something like the Engineer’s Juggernaut, providing increasing rewards for time spent in one attunement. Scaling toughness and condition damage for time spent in Earth would be fitting, evincing a boulder – slow to begin rolling but becoming unstoppable once it gets up to speed. Perhaps prolonged time in Earth could lower the cooldown to attune back to Earth? Designing it so that attunements would alternate between earth, other, earth, other, earth, etc. would be quite different than the all-inclusive hodgepodge of Arcana Eles, and would realistically reward investment in lower cooldowns on a single attunment.

Fire might benefit from something more chaotic; it would be neat, in my opinion, if fire skills had a chance to not go on cooldown when used (when traited, of course), which would make for some very unpredictable play and some potentially memorable moments. Nor would it even be as powerful as it might first sound, as the RNG already applies more than double damage on single attacks with crits. It would certainly break the usual method of play, as you won’t always know what tools you have at any given time. Clearly, neither of these could be implemented now, as the balance testing would require a pretty long timeframe. But both would provide incentive to emphasize attunements, and both would add interesting and clearly different ways for an Elementalist to play. They would devalue Arcana without devaluing attunement changing altogether, which can only be for the good. It’s what Fresh Air did: reward emphasis on one attunement without penalizing you for using others.

A note: in this discussion I am exempting all staff and focus builds from consideration, staff because I believe it is in a good position as a WvW and PvE specific weapon that is solely intended for group play and focus because it is so clearly in need of a redesign that it is simply irrelevant outside of Fractals.

First off, thanks for this patch preview, it’s a nice gesture to players even though the forums often provide pretty good reasons to ignore us. Second, while I don’t believe you’re going to accomplish your stated goals with this change, I do believe this is a step in the correct direction. Spreading condition management to different trait lines is a good step, as it helps to mitigate some of the notable reasons people spec into water. That said, Arcana is frankly still too much better than the other trait lines for any non staff build, excepting only Fresh Air builds (incidentally, Fresh Air is the best change that’s been made for the Ele since launch, it’s very well designed). This is for two reasons: 1) Arcana makes every attunement better, while much of each attunement line only helps itself. 2) Arcana synergizes with itself much better than the other trait lines, and does so in a way that works with the class as a whole.

The primary Arcana culprits are Renewing Stamina and Evasive Arcana. EA gives you two notable things; a significantly good heal with condition removal and a blast finisher. The blind is situational; the fire blast is entirely incidental. But between those two effects we have probably the single best trait for an Elementalist, and in a line that is best able to use it. Those 30 points to get there give you both boon duration and attunement swap cooldown, meaning that you can heal more often (in most builds healing on attunement as well) and that your blast-finisher might, already good at 3 stacks for 20 seconds, lasts a full 6 seconds longer. The current final part of the trifecta is Elemental Attunement, which provides non-trivial protection, somewhat trivial might, enough swiftness to get us to full uptime, and good regen (that is also condition removal when paired with Water). You get more or less everything; the problem is that it’s not only a jack of all trades line, it is also the master relative to the other trait options. It does everything, and it does it better.

Water is the notable exception. This is due to the fact that other than Piercing Shards there’s almost nothing that benefits you for being in water attunement. You gain all the benefit simply by passing through, which is exactly what the Ele wants; powerful abilities that benefit you for switching through attunements whenever possible. The faster you switch into water the more total healing you get, and there’s no loss to switch out again almost immediately. There’s no forced dead time.

The other trait lines don’t gives you the same benefit. There’s nothing significant that sticks around after you attune out. There’s nothing like Bountiful Power that powers up your attacks no matter the attunement, instead you either get things that effect you only while in that attunement or that only trigger when you’ve applied a condition that’s mostly specific to that attunement. This is admittedly true of Piercing Shards, but compare switching through water, which likely nets you at least 2604 +2x(Healing Power) health, removed conditions, and some regeneration, with switching through any of the other attunements. You drop some fairly unexciting damage and mediocre conditions. The traits don’t add anything exciting, and they don’t emphasize any strengths. The only reason that any of the attunements can add up to anything is the power of the Water rotation; it is the lynchpin of most builds. Again, Fresh Air is the exception; it breaks the mold of the usual Ele by opening up raw damage as a viable possibility, albeit only with Scepter. Without Fresh Air the Elementalist has only one viable option; build to outlast, which forces Water and Arcane for superior healing. Fresh Air lets you build differently.

Also up on Dragonbrand.

Borlis Pass event just came up if anyone want to help try it.

Edit: Failed rather terribly.