Guild Wars 2

All in all, agreed. I’d even go as far and call many of GW2’s landmarks – on top of many other designs such as characters – generic.

I think it might be a matter of too many cooks stirring the pot. The amazing concept art styles just didn’t translate well into the ingame assets this time around. Much of the 2d art is vivid, fluid, partially abstract as to leave room for interpretation – it tells a story. This has to somehow be transformed into playable content, and that conversion wasn’t entirely successful. Sadly, this problem is magnified by the fact that said painterly style is the main visual focus of the game.

Once we were with 3 ele’s doing that elite at an enemy trying to escape in WvW. He was down from full health to defeated state in about 4 seconds.

Three players using their long-cooldown elite skills one a single opponent.

Yes, the underwater tornado was strong, maybe too strong. Toning it down is completely acceptable. Why this has to happen before more glaring issues and gamebreaking bugs with the class get fixed, however, is entirely beyond me.

Asura animations are harder to read than others.
This could easily be mended by more distinctive casting effects – the Elementalist glyphs already make an example of good visual feedback. Give important skills unique animation effects and sound cues and this race superiority thing becomes a non-issue.

One of the bigger mistakes they made in regards to the “e-sports” goal was adding four new races. The game tries so hard to create an even playing field with normalized gear and skill pools, but suffers from the additional PvE variety by creating races with an inherent PvP advantage.

The solution: Play an Asura or live with the (admittedly rather insignificant) disadvantages. It’s most likely not going to change, and the better players will win regardless of race.

Except that the target marker drops every single time the targeted player uses stealth. I should’ve screenshotted the combat log where I had to consecutively re-call a thief seven times before our team was able to drop him.

This game was built upon the principle of being fun. Being on the receiving end of a stealth burst class isn’t fun, and this is not being helped by the target mark wipe on entering stealth. I’m not saying Thieves (and to a similar extent, Mesmers) are necessarily too strong, just that their mechanics make fighting them a chore more than anything else. I know it’s their defense flavour and it’s fully intentional for this to be so.

It’s been a known issue for weeks. Mildly annoying to have to check your traits after every game.

One feature I would also love to see: Profession-specific keybinds.

I picked this class up several weeks ago when everyone was complaining how bad it is, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to anything else. The fast-paced playstyle suits me just fine, and I feel somewhat confident about my steadily improving performance in PvP. Imo, the Elementalist is the most “balanced” class in the game right now.
The issues many people in this thread adressed still stand, however: The current game balance has classes that can get away with much sloppier play and still perform on par, if not better, than a decent “complex” class. Arena Net should address these three-button specs. They might make the game easier to pick up for new players, but ultimately lead to a horrible Hot-Join experience and don’t really allow for a varied meta to evolve.

One question to the OP and other experienced Ele players:
How do you go up against a decent Shortbow ranger? I die in seconds when they pop RaO or their roots if I don’t play my very best – but even if I do, their sustained damage is often simply too much. I pretty much need to use all my defensive cooldowns to live through ten seconds of focused ranger fire.
Kiting, LOSing, dodging, strafing and trying to time stuff to negate their quickness bursts are all concepts I’m trying to apply to my play – it feels like I’m playing a Chopin piece on my keyboard while they autoattack – yet I’m still losing to many good rangers, and die do bad ones if I screw up. Any tips besides “not being a glasscannon” would be much appreciated.

edit: I’m playing S/D with 30 arcana.

Diage, that was mostly spot-on and a very enjoyable read at that. I tip my hat to you.

Sadly, many of your points and concerns have been brought up before – and have fallen on deaf ears. I highly doubt the format will see major changes, as much as many of us wish for it to happen.
The approach of maximum popularity through ease of access versus (overly) complex mechanics simply reflects the current state of media development and publishing.

The OP sums ups my feelings about Structured really well.

I would somewhat disagree on point four, as personal skill does very much matter on some classes – but the gap between a bad player on a fotm class and a good player on an “effort” class – at least right now and so far – is much too small.

The other massive problem I have with the game is the amount of visual clutter. We played a 2 Mes / 2 Guards / SB Ranger team today, and while those guys outplayed us with skill as well as with better team comp, team fights were a gigantic clusterkitten. Between six illusions, a ranger pet, two chaos storms and five players, targeting becomes a nightmare. Couple that with the insane amount of NPC damage and presence in PvP – high numbers of “free” automated damage that don’t require any player input.
Asura animations are impossible to read.
Spell effects need a slider.

Oh, but there is a reason:
The Black Lion Trading Company. If you don’t want to sit through two loading screens, buy the banker golem. Imo, it’s one of many “subtle” attempts to get players to use the gem store and the only reason why there’s no bank in the Mists.

Yesterday I died to falling damage riding the lightning from the keep towards henge on Niflhel.

Simply fixing it might work, too.

Polluxo, the same can be said for half of the classes right now. Nothing can match the burst a thief can dish out if setup properly, and no other class can bunker quite as well as a guardian. Warriors are also shoehorned into a pretty limited amount of (mostly defensive / supportive) builds when it comes to competitive play. Most classes are.

Admittedly, the Ele has a paper quality to it when I screw up, but I’m overall very happy with how it plays and performs. The balance nudges and bug fixes needed to bring it in line will come with time.

But this defeats the point, as Sabrus and the OP seem to have been focused on the PvE side of things, which I have absolutely no Ele experience with. I can imagine the tediousness if the same effort is required to kill a monster. Good luck on your warriors :p.

Cool story. I’m doing the exact opposite after having tPvPed with the ele over the last few days.

Elementalists offer truly versatile gameplay, demanding mechanics and are simply a blast to play. You have to work a bit harder than other classes (lolthieves) right now, but success is so much more rewarding.
Warriors might be more straightforward and therefor easier to faceroll with, but that gets you nowhere fast and is fun for about three minutes.

I’d reconsider that choice if I were you.

Guys, guys, you’ve got it all wrong. The simple solution to every balance problem in this game is not to be a glasscannon.

I think it’s more of an overall effectivity issue. Even if autoattacks were to be buffed considerably, switching attunements and firing the other damage / utility spells will simply be more useful in most situations.

The truth is indeed that the Elementalist currently requires a lot more work and quick thinking than most other classes, and is only up to par with them if played almost flawlessly. When comparing that to the ease of use of a thief or mesmer it’s not hard to see where all the nerf calls for said classes are coming from.
People getting better at the Ele and a few balance nudges will help to make the issue less severe – but as the class is designed right now, going the extra mile will always be mandatory in order to remain competitive.

Hats off to those few of you who still manage to excel in tPvP.

The dye unlock system was announced to be account-wide many moons ago. Then, with the removal of the dye seed mechanic (24 hrs wait per dye) it was suddenly tied to single characters. The reasoning behind this being “dyes being tied to character progression make more sense” or something along these lines.

Anet offered a somewhat acceptable compromise by allowing dyes to be traded on the TP, but that whole move still leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Probably put into action to secure long-term gem store sales – there would’ve been better solutions, though.

The funny thing is that while the design goal for GW2 was to make PvP better by making it more “accessible”, the whole thing ended up being much more bloated and confusing to grasp than the original game.

Guild Wars 2 hides most of its mechanics behind visual clutter and layers of random numbers. Incoherent and confusing mechanics (damage numbers, health pools, armor values, stat points and what they do, skill descriptions, upgrades etc.) plus hardly readable combat (lack of clear visual and acoustic spell cues, RNG, traits, animations (lolasura), spell effects, targeting, no enemy skill bar, lack of a “what’s hitting me” display… Let’s not go further.

On top of that, conquest is just not deep and engaging enough to stand as the only “competitive” PvP mode. (Yet?)

This makes for an overall much more shallow experience.

TL;DR
The only thing this has in common with Guild Wars is the lore. Sorry.

The locker took 250 of each item at some point in beta. Why it doesn’t work anymore should be quite obvious.

Old discussion, curious if there will ever be a change to this color coding system. At least the spectators watching all of our games have an easy time distinguishing the teams, right?

There should be a toggle. Oh, let’s be nostalgic: Capes. No? Meow.