Showing Posts For Morthis.3968:
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D/D Ele
or
Thief@Kuora
Please link these videos from other classes (especially a guard or warrior) where they are going 1v5-8 and winning like you see on thieves/eles.
Against 8 level 5’s without keyboard, monitor and internet maybe. Can they annoy 8 people by engaging them and still escape when things get hairy? Yes, unless those 8 people happen to have a bunch of disables (immob/stun), in which case the Ele is probably screwed. Can a D/D ele engage 8 people and actually kill them? Not a chance, not if those 8 players have even a shred of skill between them.
D/D are strong, and they can be extremely annoying, but they’re not that strong, and if you’re looking to follow the zerg farming badges, they’re a pretty terrible choice. They can jump in and out of a zerg to pick off people and drop AoE’s, but they won’t even come close to a staff Ele or Necro for AoE badge farming.
Basically, it comes down to what you want.
All of it depends on how you want to play the game.
Do you want to roam around a lot, possibly solo, and be able to survive/hold your own against any class (often against multiple enemies, depending on their class/skill and your skill) and do very well in small scale engagements? If so you’ll want to be D/D, which pretty much requires that you gear defensively (PVT). D/D is gonna get less kills in zerg vs zerg standoffs though . You can still fight in them, weaving in and out of combat, but it’s nowhere near as easy as just dropping a meteor shower on the zerg from 1200 range and watching the numbers. Likewise in tower offense, D/D is near useless, and I usually go around picking off people trying to enter, or worst case scenario switch to a staff (I personally prefer to just roam near the keep since usually there’s enemies around, spamming meteor shower at a wall is boring).
If you want to stand back and AoE people, especially in tower attack/defense type scenarios, obviously staff is your best bet, and with staff in those kinds of fights, you can easily afford to go full berserker to watch people get obliterated by meteor shower. Just don’t expect to hold your own in 1v1 with that kind of setup, because the types of classes/builds you’re most likely to encounter solo would walk all over it.
If I understand correctly, the spiritmaster in Aion is more akin to a necromancer in many other MMO’s, so in that sense the necromancer in this game would be similar. Necro’s tend to have strong boon (buff) removal and condition (debuff) based builds, while also having various types of summons.
Of the two options listed, mesmer probably plays more like spiritmaster. For Elementalist one of the most popular builds is D/D, which doesn’t feel much like a caster really. You’re more like a flashy melee. Granted this applies to all casters (all of them have at least some melee weapons).
Either class you pick will have a slow start. Mesmer doesn’t really start getting nice until 40 (when you can unlock second tier traits), and I can’t remember when I started feeling more powerful on my Ele. Early on it felt like any time I agro’d more than 1-2 mobs things just fell apart.
Some of the karma vendor pieces for each of the temples in Orr are PVT, and then some dungeon gear is PVT (AC is the most popular one for that since it’s easy to farm, the weapons look nice, and it has monk runes which has 2 set bonus for D/D).
It’s not the fact that they fixed that I have a problem with. It’s the fact that those exact skills they fixed have been bugging constantly since beta stunning the user (for 3 months now, reported a thousand times) and they only fix their latest imbalance instead of fixing the skills completely. That’s the problem.
I’d say the answer to this is pretty obvious. The fix here was a simple bug fix, whereas the fix for RTL and grasp is a technical challenge. It’s not about them not wanting to fix it, it’s about them being able to do it.
What do you mean I have to spend a few minutes (and it seriously is only a few minutes) of “effort” to earn in game rewards? What a crazy concept, why isn’t everything in this game handed to me just for existing. Now I actually have to deal with the hassle of playing the game, man what a drag that is!
You’re playing a multiplayer game and you’re asking for new content to be singleplayer. Why?
Have you played GW2 before posting this? The forced multiplayer takes up about 10% of the game, if that.
I agree with the OP. Its a pain in the rear to find pickup groups, who squabble and quit halfway. Give me the normal GW2 style “jump in and have a go” ‘solo multiplayer’ anyday.
That’s because a huge chunk of content is leveling, which is always designed around solo play these days. Once you get to the end game, MMO’s have always involved a lot of grouping aspects. If you dislike this, then I don’t know what you’re doing playing MMO’s.
The category RPG as they’re using it seems entirely too broad. I don’t feel Torchlight 2 or Guild Wars 2 qualify as traditional RPG’s. They have RPG elements of course, but one is just a hack and slash that has some very basic plot to make you go on and keep murdering things, while the other is an MMO and a category of it’s own. The only MMO I’ve seen that did a fairly decent job of telling a story I might get interested in is SW:TOR, and that game failed in almost every area besides the personal story line.
Of course this year was already a struggle to find just a couple of good RPG’s to nominate, and it’s even worse with an MMO category.
Mobility overall isn’t – that’s where “100% swiftness uptime”-type argument steps in. Elementalists can achieve it without crippling their potential while mesmers can’t.
Is it fair to buff already nice elementalist mobility even more? Think about it.
I agree with this, I just thought it was stupid to harp on the no traits perma swiftness thing. For that matter, staff is actually a poor example of Elementalist mobility, because all it can do is swiftness, while D/D with standard aura build can perma swiftness along with having RTL.
You mean with the 5-skill sequence that requires a specific utility and a specific weapon? And I’d love to have clones, see we can’t have them all, can we? Anyway I’ve already said my opinion on this subject on my first post on this topic
This sequence still doesn’t require any traits or runes.
What a completely meaningless point to argue about for the sake of arguing.
Dodges, support, and defensive skills are finite. It’s more than any one player can handle in challenging content. Teamwork matters at that level of play. That’s the point. There’s a difference between “empty filler” and a failure to understand.
All these principles apply to any modern MMO. It’s not just one player doing everything while the rest is afk.
There’s a difference between having a valid point and simply trying to use fancy words to make the point sound valid.
Those of us that find “support” in this game more fulfilling than healing understand that when roles are fluid, understanding the ebb and flow of combat matters more, and your decisions and teamwork allow for more control over the outcome of the encounter than “spam rotation, don’t stand in fire, collect loot”.
The only difference I see in GW2 is that instead of don’t stand in fire, it’s dodge roll out of fire.
All this stuff about ebb and flow of combat is just empty filler words that don’t mean anything.
You know what’s even worse than facing DS?
Tornado.
Less damage, range, no missile reflect, longer cooldown, and all around terrible. You will lose many valuable players who all stand there pondering what possessed an Elementalist to equip that horrible excuse for an elite when compared to skills such as DS.
Way more OP.
last match we were playing FA and a DD ele was getting his friend to announce in zone chat (Yak) which camps he would be hitting. Sure enough he would show up, run a zerg around the map, down a couple of lowbies and generally cause a ruckus.
While he was no doubt a master of his class I can’t think of any other game that lets people get away with this kind of stuff.
So a class with high mobility (and there are several others, like thief and GS warrior) leads a zerg of complete idiots in a circle and this is game breaking?
Heck if we’re gonna adapt the game to stupidity, why don’t we just add auto dodge for any dangerous attack, that way people don’t have to deal with the inconvenience of paying attention to animations either.
These suggestions are just bad.
We don’t want more traits that focus on a specific attunement. Our trait lines are filled with this as is, and they’re almost universally ignored and considered worthless. Attempting to add more shows basically zero understanding of how Elementalist currently works/is played.
Whether by design or not, a lot of current Elementalist playstyles revolve around constant attunement swapping, and this is especially true for D/D. This is exactly why high arcane is considered so necessary, and you cannot change this by saying “Oh increase the cooldowns and add some traits”. Your suggestion is basically a complete overhaul of how the Elementalist works, because the very purpose of constant attunement swapping is to take advantage of these shortish cooldowns in each attunement (while using the long ones as needed). Remove those, and you have completely changed the class’s playstyle.
This would be akin to me suggesting thief culling issues can be fixed by simply changing the revealed debuff from stealth to like 10-15 seconds and then giving thief some new traits to survive easier. Even if the class still works with those changes, it’s simply a completely different class from the one it was before, with consistent access to stealth.
This would be way too strong. Our elites are so absurdly useless in most situations I forget I even have them, it would be a no brainer to ditch it for another weapon.
Too bad this combo hits for a ton less than the complained about combo’s and it’s a near melee range combo as well. I’ve also never seen flame grab crit for 13k personally, even as glass cannon.
If we’re doing silly one for one comparisons like this, my Ele would love to know which one I pick up that does as much damage as 100b. :p
I don’t sPvP with staff (S/D) and even then not terribly much so I’ll focus on PvE and WvW.
PvE: A lot of people dislike Ele here. They can’t just walk in, grab 50 mobs and 100b them all down, but if you don’t mind the ele playstyle of using a million spells to do anything then PvE really isn’t too bad. It’s not as mindless 2 buttons to kill everything, whether you consider this a plus or a minus depends on what you want out of PvE.
Dungeons: I think Ele’s are solid here, especially staff. Staff has very good support options and two water fields.
WvW: You can actually make a glass cannon Ele work a lot better here if you zerg surf, so you can do a ton of damage with meteor shower in keep fights. Or you can do with something like S/D and roam around instead.
Hopes:
- Improvements to the mass of traits nobody in their right mind takes
- Improvements to our elites so it doesn’t feel like a useless slot
Dagger Storm is a better tornado than tornado is.
Or they could just, you know, make useful elites for us. They’ve managed to make dagger storm, obviously they’ve figured out how to make whirl elites that are good, so I’m not sure what their excuse is for tornado.
Any chance you could also look into our elites? They’re a bit disappointing and lackluster.
It’s kinda disappointing. Last time we (FA) matched up against Dragonbrand in the 24 hour matchups, they got destroyed because of our overnight capping. First weekly matchup, overnight capping from us claimed the whole map again as well. Now we’re been in two losing matchups (although last one we had comfortable second place at least) and I’m not even seeing full queues during prime time anymore. I don’t know if it’s people who have lost interest in queuing, or people who have simply left, but it’s a very noticeable effect. Going from having queues at night/morning US time to having no queue during prime time US.
A simple fix to dagger storm. It’s basically better in every conceivable way when compared to Elementalist tornado. Remove thieves from the game please!
An important consideration is also what each class gives up to attain this, which is being ignored.
Saying you run fast but requiring specific weapon loadouts and specific utility/elite skills you wouldn’t otherwise want to use isn’t much help unless you enjoy constantly swapping those around.
I know engineer and some elementalist builds (especially staff) can easily get perma swiftness without making sacrifices. I know for thief shortbow is a pretty standard weapon for one of the slots anyway, but the 25% movespeed is on a signet that is otherwise virtually useless.
Elementalist does not need the burst of other classes tbh. We have permenant regen, vigor, and swiftness, and we’re also the only class that can stack 25 stacks of might easymode. Why do we need the best burst damage in the game?
I’d love to know what trait and realistic rotation you’re using to achieve all that, because that doesn’t sound terribly realistic.
I could see an argument for D/D roaming, but anything large scale group based, there’s really nothing D/D offers that makes up for the loss of staff.
Staff has stronger group support options with two water fields (of the 4 that exist in game atm).
Staff has stronger area denial, able to spam a lot of different AoE’s that players cannot stand in for very long without dying.
Staff is probably the strongest class in the game when it comes to cleaning up siege.
What does D/D offer compared to this? A better ability to 1v1 someone, but what else?
Even our pug zerg avoided the supply camp. That’s why we were halfway through the inner door before the first defenders managed to get in. Not that it did them much good. Too late.
It’s their fault if they didn’t left a few guys to scout your zerg’s movements. This is how WvW should be.
The problem is, who wants to be the guy who does this?
Everybody goes off to fight, earn badges, exp, money, karma, and the one guy gets to sit there half the night staring at an empty road. That’s not fun, and the very fact that you consider rotating assignments for a boring aspect of the game should tell you that it has no place in something played for entertainment.
If this was some sort of competitive sport, I’d accept the answer that someone has to take one for the team, that’s part of teamwork. This is not a competitive sport, it’s players fighting each other for fun, and if an important aspect of this is for several players to be bored out of their minds all night, their design for this has failed.
I also thought sentries were supposed to serve as some sort of warning beacon for approaching zergs, but they don’t really do that at all, they’re just an objective for someone to go solo for easy exp/karma/money.
As far as all this goes, I think daoc did a much better job of it, by warning guilds when their keep was under attack, along with the actual number of players in the area so you know how important it is.
So many people here don’t have a clue…
Elementalists do significant dmg under water, I have no idea what any of you are talking about.
Ontop of that we have 1 aoe blind, 4 stuns, and a chill skill underwater.
And then you have the gall to say WE DO NO DMG UNDERWATER.
Seriously, some people here need to learn how to play there class.
Congratulations on completely failing to address the point.
The argument is our damage is poor underwater. Your reply is we have 1 aoe blind, 4 stuns and a chill, none of which are damaging attacks…
Our underwater damage is extremely poor compared to above water. We have a ton of control/utility skills, but relatively few hard hitters, and the auto attacks for all attunements pretty much suck underwater.
Calling mistform a counter to backstab seems pretty silly, considering it’s long cooldown and the fact that a thief should be able to go through two more C&D before having spent all his init.
Anyway I don’t think it’s so much about balance anymore, or even thief specifically, just some level of scaling is going wrong. A hit for 17k damage in WvW is absurd, even if it’s a fully exotic berserker gear thief with a glass cannon spec against a level 2. The upscaling to 80 should prevent numbers as crazy as that.
I was using it and its not fine, its stupid (I main elementalist sPvP) it is obviously bugged.
Also those complaining about our lack of damage underwater, obviously haven’t seen the ludicrous amount of cc we get underwater.
Yeah CC will really help me kill the mob in a respectable period of time. Don’t worry guys! I only hit for 3 damage but at least I can sink him twice and float him once!
^ SoS and FA are teaming on IoJ because we’re winning. This isn’t how it should be. Wvw should be 1v1 and not 1v1v1. Terrible servers will make alliance and that isn’t fair to anyone. You shouldn’t kid yourself when you’re bad.
^
Doesn’t get it.
Why would it be broken? Frankly, I’d give people with less than 20k health a popup window when entering pvp, saying “You’re now entering a highly hazardous zone with inadequate defenses. Are you certain you wish to proceed?” (then I’d do the same for Orr :p).
People enter pvp with full Berserker and expect to destroy everything. They will – until something sneezes in their general direction. Even better, they end up with utilites that increase damage, such as Arcane Power, while completely ignoring defenses like Mist Form.
Don’t get me wrong, that 17k hit is insane and definitely over the top, however it came to be. All I’m saying is, Elementalist isn’t as weak as people make it sound. If you build for full damage, expect to die a lot. If, however, you also take care about your defense, you’ll live longer, but deal less damage. You can’t have the cake and eat it.
What’s the point of telling people “Hey guys you can specialize in these 5 trees, pick whatever appeals to you most” if you have to follow it up with “Just as long as you pick Earth or Water, otherwise you’ll just be free kills for everybody!”
A class like thief often specs glass cannon too, and they have the same low health as us, and yes I know a glass cannon thief can die very easy, has counters, etc. The thing is, a glass cannon thief can work, because they have the combination of incredible burst damage, and some defensive tools (such as stealth) to fall back on.
Why can the same not be true for Elementalist? Why are we essentially forced to spec defensive or mostly be a free kill?
Ive learned though in WvW the tornado’s knockbacks are extremly useful.
Really? I find it extremely situational in WvW.
If everybody is clustered on a door, it can work decently, but even then you’ll probably die to AoE spam. If people are just spread out, you’ll hit like 3 people with tornado’s short range while the other 50 burn you down from range. Even if you find a perfect cluster, you’ll throw them all back and then nobody is in range while you try to chase two people with it. The only time it’s been useful at all is in very small engagements where the other side is caught by surprise (and really tornado wasn’t a game changer then, just a neat ability to play with) or throwing people off cliffs (this can be hilarious but hardly justifies an elite slot normally).
It’s so silly. Dagger storm and tornado are fairly comparable, but dagger storm is basically better in every single way. It’s more painful, it has like 5 times the range, it’s much more durable thanks to the projectile reflect, and it has half the cooldown. The only gain we get is the knockdown, which doesn’t mean much considering how trivial it is to avoid being hit by tornado with it’s terrible range and slow speed.
Yes, the Mesmer is definitely one of the hardest professions to master in this game, and possibly the hardest to learn too.
The shattering system leads to complex decision-making for several reasons (should I sacrifice all my illusions?, when is the best time to use this effect?), the clone management demands more area awareness than most other professions, and the skills and the traits are less focused on direct effects, and more on anti-play, abstract mechanics, interrupts, etc. They’re also almost as squishy as the elementalists.
Usually people are talking about a cookie cutter phantasm build. Summon both your phantasms and watch them kill for you. Throw in moa if you’re losing.
That build really isn’t terribly hard to play, you don’t need to shatter, you just summon phantasms and stay alive, and yet it’s incredibly effective.
Except the complaint about few bugged skills, the rest can be intended as the rambling of a few disgruntled players that don’t want to put in the time to make an ele great, both in PvP and PvE , if we talk about potential the ele doesn’t lack anything at all, with efforts you simply obtain greater results than on any other profession, being allowed to dance between 4 different stance is amazing.
It’s not a straighforward profession, so people who are used to WoW frost mage or similar can’t grasp yet the potential of the ele, give it some time and the number of complaints will drastically decrease but in the meantime I’d suggest you to go out there and die 1000 times , trying different builds and use all traits,amulet and trinket you can think; this is the best way to master the ele
This is just a load of BS. I agree that Ele’s aren’t anywhere near as bad as some people make it sound, but there are some issues. To say that with some effort Ele can obtain greater results than any other profession is a flat out lie. We will never touch the burst dps of some other classes. We will never touch the 1v1 ability of some other classes. Those two are two that come to mind, I’m sure there’s more.
Are ele’s unplayable? Of course not. They just suffer in certain areas. Our traits are mostly bad, focused on a specific element without secondary benefits (which all the weapon specific traits get for other classes), our elites range from mediocre to terrible, our downed state is bar none the worst in the game, and our underwater combat seems to do about 1/10th the damage it should be doing.
Elementalist is one of the tankiest classes in the whole entire game in sPvP. Once you figure out water combo fields blast and switching to water wipes most condis you end up healing like 4k every 4-6 seconds. not counting the heal skill, as well as condi wiping.
“DPS” ele Sept/dagger replaces the Thief roamer many times in competitive play actually. roaming in with 25 stacks of might from blasts = big damage and large room for defense.
Elementalists are all about blast combo finishers, necros have no where as much healing/condi removal as an ele, it’s why they need stats.
Huh? Scepter/Dagger doesn’t have many combo fields, in fact I’m pretty sure they only get one (fire #4). They get a ton of blasts, but no fields, just like staff gets a ton of fields but only one blast (unless you have evasive arcana).
I’m kinda confused why people are comparing earth and fire by themselves, as if they stand alone and can’t be combined.
My “typical” dungeon attack chain might be something like Fire: Lava Font, Flame Burst, Meteor Shower, Lava Font -> Air: Static (for vuln stacks if you have projectile finishers) -> Earth: Eruption, Glyph of Storms, Unsteady, Eruption -> Water: Geysyer or Healing rain combo the last eruption, Frozen Ground, Ice Spike -> Fire: repeat, meteor shower should be ready again (or a few seconds off).
If your group doesn’t need healing or mitigation from chill you can skip water and combo field with lava font instead for might.
(edited by Morthis.3968)
I don’t care much for the current system, it doesn’t encourage working together really, it just encourages you making sure you tag everybody to get kill contribution.
Somehow, supporting/healing/disabling etc during the fight doesn’t count for anything towards the kill, but hitting a downed enemy who is 1 second away from getting stomped? Full contribution, have your loot!
It’s just a silly system, and it does seem to hurt guardians more than most, since they are fairly support focused and their ranged options and both weak and limited. Do they get credit for retal on others? That alone might make it workable, but I don’t think they do.
Engineer kits don’t have auto attack either and almost everyone agrees engineer kits if used properly are amazing (except the universal toolkit as that one is just too weird and random)
You’re thinking about the conjured weapons all wrong. You should hop into them, use a couple of the skills and hop back to your normal skills, which engineers do. Not just run around with the conjured weapon because it has a timer.
That’s because engineers can hop in and out of their kit without penalty, that’s how their class was designed. Now imagine if they could only use a kit once every 2 minutes, I doubt they’d still be so excited about them.
Very nice video.
I felt bad for you guys til I made an ELE and facerolled sPvP.
in Elementalist
Posted by: Morthis.3968
This video is great. Seven minutes of video and I saw maybe 3 attunement switches total. You spend the entire game in air auto attacking and still dying to random AoE, while your team does all the work. Didn’t use any of staff’s AoE or support, just kind of stood there auto attacking. You’re lucky your team knew what they were doing, because I think anyone in your situation would have been hard pressed to be more useless to the team than you were.
Fire elemental hits for huge damage? What?
I do more damage just auto attacking with fireball, and staff auto attacks a pretty weak. The elemental does decent damage, but most definitely not huge, especially not coming from an elite with a decently long cooldown. It also dies in just a few hits from almost anything (unless it’s in the middle of the swoop where it evades).
I mostly use ice. It’s fairly durable, it still does decent damage, and it heals/chills. It’s still nothing great really, but at least that one usually survives to actually contribute some to the fight.
Have people never played team sports (or any sports)? You will never win them all. One loss isn’t the end of the world. One team beating you doesn’t mean your season has ended. You also don’t have to be number one to enjoy yourself.
It’s not so much about winning or losing, it’s about these score differences that basically made the score system pointless. Many of these matchups had their outcome determined by the end of the first day, and yet the match lasts a whole week. What’s the point of dragging it out for a week, when the round is already decided 1 day in? What will be the point of making it two weeks, if the round is decided day 1?
Right now, I’m on a winning side, but I remember being on the losing side of this plenty, watching one side cap literally everything overnight (right now we seem to be the ones doing it, I have no clue how considering how many times we were wiped off the map by night caps during the 24 hour rounds). The competition is gone, the excitement of trying to win is gone, you’re just fighting players at this point. The objectives? Eh take them because they’re objectives.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, WvW is fun for it’s own sake, but they specifically added this point system to create a bigger sense of competition, of trying to beat the other worlds, and a means of measuring that. Sadly, the point system so far has completely failed to live up to that.
So you find all 3 of our elites to be useful? You don’t mind that our downed state is the only one in the game that can’t prevent a stomp?
Personally, I find those two to be the most glaring oversights, but there’s other aspects as well (such as being forced to spec high into survivability for PvP).
Yes, it has a huge effect on it. Here is a list of coefficients for how skills scale with weapon damage.
I love these posts. Every single one of them seems to assume that the rest of us haven’t figured out other attunements yet. It’s basically insulting, because it’s nothing more than a veiled “L2P noob”.
Here’s a hint, we’ve figured out attunements, I was doing that from day 1, that doesn’t magically fix all the issues. I don’t think the state is as bad as people make it out to be, but there’s definitely some changes needed.
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