Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

Taunt: Having your avatar act against your will is never fun.

Largely true. I can only think of one time losing control of my character was fun. Back in pre-Luciln EQ my monk got charmed by a gnoll (I thnk) and I was hit by a lag spike at the same time. When everything caught up I’d apparently killed half the group and everyone else had fled. That was legitimately kind of a fun moment; though if anyone had actually been upset it wouldn’t have been.

MyPuppy.8970:

Let’s admit the Ele was designed to be a support class

How do you figure this? Outside of water atunement and a couple specific traits there’s generally very little support to the class. If you look at the vast majority of the skills and traits available to the class it seems pretty solidly damage oriented.

Now guardians, there’s a class designed to be support. Heck, if you squint just right it even looks like the warrior might have been designed with more of a ‘support’ mindset than elementalists what with all the banners and shouts they have available.

ghost.3208:

(still would be funny to have some race themed events like this).

We just had one with the humans and their whole Queen’s Jubilee/Clockwork Chaos thing.

Faux.1937:

“=” does mean queal….. IDK what you mean by an ! in front of it, but the way I read it is that you said Medieval = fantasy, for all I knew that “!” was just that an ! mark.

It’s a programming thing and so it’s leaked onto the rest of the internet as occasionally happens. Personally I think that outside of actually coding =/= at least ‘looks’ more like the not equal to symbol.

spalt.6938:

Don’t you think that’s just a bit… much?

A fan of the fine art of understatement are you?

Charak.9761:

He spawns every 2.5hrs like normal.

It’s spawned twice since the patch went up at noonish. The second of those times was at two-ish. So it’s not every 2.5 hours like normal.

Vayne.8563:

Depends on how it scales. It should scale to a lower number of players still.

They’ve said in interviews that it was designed to require at least 80 people to take it down. So I doubt it scales down very much.

That’s about where we got it on JQ. My general first impression of the new version of the guy is, “Holy mother of ow.” Pretty much sums it up really.

Snores.7806:

Which AAA MMO have you participated in for the last 5 tears has given you “long term enjoyment” ? Swtor ? DCUO ? LotRO ? AoC? WAR ?

I can’t name a single one apart from WoW and EVE, and they’ve been going for 10 yrs. MMO companies have discovered that the easy bucks are based around hype and a quick turnaround

WoW just hit 8 years old a couple weeks ago. Not that I imagine you care since this was from days ago, but oh well.

Personally City of Heroes provided me with about 8+ years of enjoyment and would likely have continued to do so if not for the unfortunate closure. The original Guild Wars was always a fun game to go putter about in now and again too.

Zaxares.5419:

True, but that doesn’t mean we can’t thank people for doing their job. Do you never say “Thank you” to a server who brings you your meal, for instance? They may just be doing their job, but politeness can go a long way in brightening their day and making sure they continue to do a good job in the future.

I didn’t actually mean to imply otherwise. I was more intending my remark towards the ‘rejoice’ comment and the fact that in many games I’ve seen people effusively praise developer teams when they finally get around to fixing a long broken class/power/mechanic/whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t see politeness and heartfelt thanks as praise. They’re both things that someone who’s done their job well just flat out deserves. I’ll just chalk up the misunderstanding of my meaning to my thought process being admittedly a little odd on certain topics.

E Kay.9236:

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

Creslin.1758:

Hell yah! Thanks so much devs.

And Methodic, seriously I can’t believe you’re still complaining about this…rejoice my brother!

Rejoice in what, exactly? What is there to rejoice in? I would gladly rejoice, if there was something worth rejoicing over.

Okay, so they should stop fixing issues… got it.

Personally, thank you Arena Net.

Ok, I’m going to throw this out there. Fixes should not be praised or rejoiced over, they should be expected. That includes fixes to things that are brokenly overpowerd as well as things that are underpowered.

Granted I’m well aware there’s a vast gulf between what should be and what is, but that’s my general stance on the matter of fixes.

tigirius.9014:

Yeah and you have to trait for them to get it. My point was that other weapons for other classes give them boons when they equip even from sigils. Engineers don’t even get sigil boons or countdowns.

Since you mentioned elementalists I figured you were meaning the stat boosts their conjured weapons now provide instead of boons. I’ll certainly agree that engineer’s kits need to either use their weapon’s stats or provide their own like conjured weapons do, but I’d like to point out that conjured weapons themselves don’t provide any boons on equip regardless of an elementalist’s traits.

…

Also when did elementalists suddenly go from being often perceived as underpowered to overpowered? I must have missed something somewhere. Is it just because people discovered that d/d can do some very nice burst damage or something?

I will admit that I wish the greater elementals had at least a slight visual differentiation from the lesser ones. It’s really the difference between the regular and veteran enemies though so it’s not all that surprising there isn’t one.

…

I really wish there was more of a visual differentiation between regular enemies and their veteran and champion versions.

There’s mostly just not very many back slot items available.

Drunken Mad King.8193:

unique [ju??ni?k]
adj
1. being the only one of a particular type; single; sole

@fourpoundburrito If it is the only one of a particular type; single; sole…. that by nature means you wouldn’t be able to equip 2 because 2 is greater than 1…..

I am sorry you made the mistake of either not seeing what unique meant either in the context of the game or the true meaning of unique.

Unique does not mean special it means that there cannot be another like it. This would imply your character could not use 2. I apologize but that is exactly what I interpreted the moment I saw the word.

To be fair:
unique [ju??ni?k]
adj
1. being the only one of a particular type; single; sole
2. without equal or like; unparalleled
3. Informal very remarkable or unusual

Though the common usage of the word is the first definition.

Dacromir.6207:

Okay, check this video out

That burst had two components. The first part was 12k damage, and that can be done every 12s. The second part was the 9k hit, and that can be done every 36s. Additionally, he had other huge-hitting burst skills (arcane) that he could use, which would hit for well over 4k each. Arcane skills don’t interrupt your current cast and can be cast while you’re using other skills. He also would do bucketloads of damage with Drake’s Breath or even the fire autoattack, to finish off the people who survive the 12k hit.

Not only could he pull off 12k+ burst every 12s, that burst is a 5-target AoE. He could zoom into a group of 3 people and nearly kill them in seconds, and then absolutely wreck them if Fire Grab was available. Our burst is single-target.

Admittedly I did not spend a ton of time reading that thread, but in glancing at it I didn’t find a readily noticeable video link anywhere.

That aside, I don’t really play d/d on my elementalist but the only 12s recharge power I can recall off hand is magnetic grasp which isn’t AoE that I an recall. Were you talking about the 15 second recharge ride the lightning instead?

Huh, no points in arcane on that ele at all.

But yea, they can do that once every 45 seconds …

Any light armored caster class wielding a warrior/thief weapon looks wrong to me (that´s why I refuse to play D/D – if I want that, I log on my thief. And Mesmer with GS seems even more weird to me, unfortunately).

I’ve never quite understood this mindset completely. I mean I know it’s the common trope in video games but there’s all sorts of exceptions to it in literature (Gandalf and Glamdring for one). Really the whole wizards = weak frail guys always struck me more as a tabletop game balance point than anything else and even they’re starting to move away from it nowdays.

… I don’t think that ‘2’ means what you think it means.

I doubt I was the only one who clicked on the thread thinking it was something about two separate small weapons.

That said I’ve not really had too big of a problem with the size of the weapons. They fit the size of the asura body for the most part. Unfortunately that’s just a little on the small size, but if the weapons were made too large it’d just end up looking terribly comical.

EnochDagor.6185:

How about an alert ahead of time that you are out of range?

Again, how about an alert ahead of time that you are out of range?

There’s actually an indicator on if your target is in range or not under the skill button. If there’s a red bar there then you’re out of range.

Isila.2574:

spam Shatterstone to stack its vulnerability sky-high so that it takes a ton of extra damage.

To clarify for folks who don’t know and aren’t likely to check the wiki or anything (you know they’re there), that’s up to a max of 25% extra damage. Each hit of shatterstone gives 4% extra damage.

Wheeping Song.6423:

Chris.7653:

Just a heads up, ANet has already announced D/D improvements and downed state improvements coming for ele.

source?

The thread about D/D improvements someone wants to see that’s (currently) on the first page here and has an anet response.

Or here if you want.

Amnon.4769:

Let me put it in simpler terms:
This game has 2 challenging classes, and 6 easy classes.
People who can only play easy classes are trying to force ANet into changing Elementalist to be easy.
I don’t like to play an easy class because I find it boring.

Usually in MMOs ‘challenging’ classes perform poorly. Most often this is because the class was tuned to be too weak. It could be not enough damage, or health or what-have-you, but they end up being too weak and are thus more challenging compared to other classes.

If it turns out that elementalists really are performing poorly as measured by the devs then I can’t imagine them not trying to fix the problem. In other games the developers have generally measured that in terms of either xp/death or xp gain over time, but it may very well be different here.

Still I don’t see ANet going and buffing elementalists just on forum complaints alone so don’t worry about that. Of course on the flip side, if they determine they need a buff then no amount of wheedling will change that either.

Dagraan.2854:

just wondering, i have 30 skill points to spend on one or the other; but i honestly have no idea which is better for say…PvE which i mostly do to be honest.
just wondering if anybody knows which would be a better choice to go with for a while because at the moment im just using the skill slot for the big element which i use from time to time to draw aggro on tougher fights, or back up extra damage on group events.

To be honest I’ve not found tornado to be very useful in PvE, but its underwater version is the only underwater elite elementalists have access to. I can’t speak about the hounds, but the greater elemental so far has been far more handy than my asura’s golems and I’d imagine the same would be true of the hounds.

So yea, tornado but keep the elementals on land but slot tornado(whirlpool) on your underwater skill-bar. That’s my suggestion anyway.

Amnon.4769:

Like I said, they have other classes to play which are far easier. I want my challenging class, I honestly couldn’t care less if other people don’t enjoy it, because for them to enjoy it would detract from MY enjoyment of the class.

Just like I don’t play a Warrior because I find it boring (which you don’t see my whining about on the Warrior forums), if you have a problem with Elementalists, then don’t play one.

Do you see me whining anywhere here? I’m just saying that usually when I see people talking about how much they like a class because it’s so challenging to play and all the people saying it’s underperforming just don’t know how to play the game …. it’s because the class isn’t performing well and needs some sort of tweaking.

Personally I enjoy my elementalist and don’t see myself not playing it anytime soon. That said I see plenty of other people doing roughly the same things I am without being challenged nearly as much and can easily see either elementalists being balanced up to them or those other classes being tweaked downward to meet us. Until then I’ll continue to putter about on my elementalist and a couple alts.

Amnon.4769:

They can play a Warrior, then. What in the name of all that is good is wrong with some “elitist” players liking a CHALLENGE in a game once in a while?!

As a general rule, the “elitist” players who want a challenging class tend to pick overall poor performing classes that can perform decently only under very specific situations.

Think about it, if a very skilled player is feeling a good solid challenge from something then what’s the average Joe feeling? They’re throwing up their hands in frustration and switching to a different character, and that just doesn’t work as well in an MMO as it does in a ‘single-player’ game, especially one trying to be as ‘fun’ and ‘accessible’ as GW2 is.

Vissarion.6509:

number 2, number 2, number 2 like a boss…

Looking at the combat log they at least got utterly destroyed by someone putting in a little bit of effort. Number 5, move around behind them then number 1.

BishopX.6453:

dont you know that we have been using keyboard to walk and use the mouse to click hot keys since before you was eating solid foods?
An entire generation of daoc and UO players mastered pvp just fine without your non pro looking circle straifing and mashing 123123 with your left hands..

I don’t recall if DAoC let you mouselook to turn, but if it did I used it and I made extensive use of keybinds for all of my spells and RAs. Granted it’s been a while since I played the game, but I did play for five years starting just a bit after release.

I generally agree with what I think you’re trying to say … I’m just saying most people I know who played DAoC didn’t use their mouse for their powers.

You could also add the knockback and blowout abilities. So:

• Gust (staff) 400 knockback (30 second recharge)
• Burning Retreat (staff) will move you out of range and will evade attacks (20 second recharge)
• Updraft (dagger off-hand) blowout 200 and swiftness plus launches you back (40 second recharge)

Gust works like a projectile and is kind of easy to dodge though sadly.

Albrizz.5047:

I’m gonna be honest Quin, that sounds entirely inaccurate. Threat is based off of how threatening you are to a target. How likely that target is going to die if it lets you live as opposed to another character.
With that in mind, damage done to said target would play one of the more important roles in determining threat.

That’s actually more or less how it was described in a couple interviews I read a while back. I also recall them saying that certain enemies will prioritize who to attack differently. So in theory an enemy could go after people based on their health or their toughness or if they’re applying a lot of boons and so on and so forth. I’m not sure if any of that made it into the game, but it’s a nice thought.

It’s probably a good idea to stop thinking of aggro as how much ‘threat’ you’ve generated and more what you’ve done to catch the enemy’s eye … which isn’t always just damage.

Here you go. The wiki link for auras.

Arcane.4950:

The point was other ranged classes having more damage, health, toughness and survivability

I’m assuming you say that knowing pretty much every class (aside from the Guardian to an extent) has several ‘ranged’ options and could be called a ‘ranged’ class. Similarly every class aside has melee weapons aside from the Engineer(which still has a melee kit). So you’re basically saying that every other class has more damage, health, toughness and survivability.

sPvP is the only place where balance matters, you think the mobs you kill care if you oneshot them or not?

Really? Balance is always important whether its in PvP or PvE, it’s often just highlighted in PvP games more readily. Seriously, even in completely PvE games if one class/weapon/build is out of balance then players complain, migrate to other build/weapons/classes and then in a good PvE game the devs eventually nerf/buff/fix things.

Just because you may not care about PvE don’t mistake that for the devs/other players not caring.

Arcane.4950:

None are viable in sPvP, worthless skills.

Just to reiterate here, not good in sPvP =/= worthless skill. There’s a whole lot more game to GW2 that just sPvP.

TheVin.7950:

Your skills even allow you to absorb all conditions from alies, think of what would happen if you’d use that skill and got 25 stacks of bleed, burning and all the other crap with 10k base

Plague Signet also allows you to transfer all conditions on you to an opponent, but yea they have a lot of skills that involve putting negative conditions on themselves

Arcane.4950:

Basically the 4 -5 weapons are totally wasted utility slots, none of them are viable in competitive pvp and i would be perfectly happy if they were removed and replaced with anything.

Completely aside from competitive PvP I’ve had fairly good survivability in PvE out of the little bit I used Lightning Hammer. It probably has something to do with the somewhat spammable AoE damage/blind on the third button one skill thunderclap.

Just to be fair here, even if a class is overpowered in general (as opposed to just having an overpowered build) doesn’t mean it can’t have underpowered traits or abilities.

Similarly classes that are generally underpowered can still have builds or powers that aren’t.

In this video you can see who is chasing who.

I was actually curious and tried to watch the video … except it had been removed because of excessive length apparently.

The real problem isn’t so much the lack of weapon swapping, since we do have a considerable number of abilities, but that we’re locked more into a range and general play-style with whichever weapon we choose to use at any time. So while most other classes can equip two weapons which allow greatly differing playstyles (like maybe melee defensive with mace/shield and a longbow for long-ranged AoE) elementalists are locked into a range (and occasionally locked into something like AoE as with staff).

What I’d love to see eventually is another weapon for the elementalist that has different ranges for each attunement. Something like 1200 for air, 900 for fire, 600/400 for water and melee range for earth, and perhaps have it get increasingly more AoE focused as the range reduces.

Munchkin.4137:

@Olinn. I am aware that Eruption is a blast finisher. That is why whenever I am using Staff, I make sure to equip Arcane Wave. As to Flame Burst, like I said to Seraskus, Signet of Fire is vastly superior. You could use both, by all means. However, you would have to give something up. Signet of Earth for CC and landing Lava Fonts, Arcane Wave for having a blast finisher that is actually good, Mist Form for…living, Armor of Earth for Prot/Stability/Stun Break, Lesser Elementals for soloing or for healer duty.

I figure it’s safe to assume you were directing that to me yes

I’m really not sure that I understand why you think Signet of Fire is better though. They have the same uptime over a 20 second period (That’s one application of Signet of Fire and two of Flame Burst) and over that 20 second period Flame Burst is capable of hitting an area of effect. I’m not going to say it’s the best power ever or anything, but it’s better than the active effect of Signet of Fire and certainly fits in with the AoE nature of an elementalist’s staff.

You’ve managed not to actually try and convince me that eruption is bad though. Sure you’ve said it’s bad because its slow, but I’ve found that’s what makes it useful. In PvE content I very rarely miss hitting the enemies I intend to with it. In PvP though yea …. That doesn’t make it a bad power though, just a bad PvP one.

Deepblue.1237:

Thats exactly why i will reroll my mesmer for an elementalist. I love the challenge!

Yea, I’ve noticed over the years that there seems to be a decently good (and vocal) portion of any game community that very much enjoys working twice as hard to less (or at best equal) effect. I’ve also frequently seen at least a portion of that group bitterly complain and actively fight against any buffs to the class. Even going so far as to say the developers saying the class as a whole was under-performing were in error (not lying, just that they were wrong). Oddly I’ve usually seen this with low defense ranged classes (City of Heroes’ Blasters for instance).

Not to imply that you’re one of those people mind you, just taking your comment as a segue into mine as those people usually talk about how much they like the challenge of the class and how effective/powerful they are when nothing goes wrong.

Earth: Earth has Eruption, which is another one of the slow animating skills. God is this thing slow.

Which is actually kind of why it’s fantastic. You might not have noticed, but it’s actually a blast finisher. Its slow animation makes it perfect for starting out in that attunement or just hopping to earth for its animation time and then switching to any of the other three attunements to lay down whatever elemental field you want to use the blast finisher on.

As you mention staff does provide some very good support and using eruption in this way you can add either 3 stacks of AoE might (or 4 if you have points in arcane), AoE healing, AoE Frost Armor or AoE swiftness as the situation calls for it. This is also why removing any type of fire field from staff’s flame attunement isn’t the best way to go about things.

Also flame burst is a pretty long duration AoE burn. I’m not sure what’s supposed to be bad about that.

Haxtodamax.5810:

Well that sort of stinks that you have to choose between the two weapon crafting. I do have a ranger and I prefer bows to swords, so I guess I will pick hunting.

I think I will do jewelry too, I haven’t found one ring yet.

You can switch back and forth between crafting skills and not lose progress for a fee. Granted, if you do it too much I’m sure it’ll get quite expensive, but it’s still there as an option.

I actually made a post about this ages ago when I found out that every elementalist underwater has the same abilities, which is super annoying as air and earth attunements require you to be melee range in order to maximize damage.

Of course, if you think about it Elementalists have twice as many mainhand skills underwater as any other profession out there, and pretty much every other profession has half of their underwater abilities as melee/close ranged.

It’s just that they get it all on one weapon instead of the two for everyone else.

To clarify I certainly get and have noticed crits. I’ve just never seen damage marked in red.

I had a similarly frustrating experience with the Asura level 16 personal story mission ‘Free Rein’.

In the mission there’s 4 portals that constantly spawn groups of elementals once you defeat a group and they’re placed rather close together. Trying to fight at one of the portals would generally pull at least one other group of elementals and on my elementalist I couldn’t kill a whole second group of elementals before the first group respawned. Trying to play carefully I’d eventually get overrun and trying to just blast through to the boss would usually end up pulling three spawns of elementals at the same time with a chance of agroing the boss at the end.

I’d most likely do better on a class that could defeat the groups faster than they could spawn or on one that was sturdier, but on my elementalist that mission was just horrid. I nearly started to break armor I died so many times.

Come to think of it most of my deaths on my elementalists have been in personal story missions or in WvW.

Wait … damage marked in red? Is this in the combat window or in the numbers showing above the opponent? I don’t pay enough attention to the former to really notice there, but if it’s supposed to be the latter then I’ve never seen it either.

Um … not elementalists?

You know the problem with gold sellers ?
Its gold buyers, if no one would buy then they wouldnt come ingame to make business.

Yea I’m pretty much with this one. Which is why I’m sad here since there’s a legal and easy way to effectively buy gold here in GW2 if you really must have it.

What makes me even sadder was that for at least a couple days there (and possibly still, I dunno) it was actually more expensive to buy your gold from a gold spammer than it was to buy gems and sell them for gold.

Trenith.1832:

The second Earth ability on the Elementalist’s staff comes to mind too.

You create a pile of rocks that puts on a good whopping 6 stacks of bleed. That’s kind of cool except…

It also takes around 5-6 seconds to explode, making it in both PVE and PVP a completely useless 1 out of 20 (made-up statistic ;D) successful lands.

For what it’s worth in PvE it’s actually kind of fantastic I’ve found. Start off in water, lay down a frozen ground, pull the enemies over it, switch to earth and lay down eruption on the edge of that, switch to fire and lay down a lava font and when eruption goes off hit ’em with flame burst. If you get the timing right you end up with enemies that are chilled with six stacks of bleed and on fire while everyone around the lava fond has at least 3 stacks of might (possibly 4 stacks and some protection left). Yay for eruption being a finisher.

You can also use it to both bleed enemies and AoE heal your friends if you lay it down and then put a geyser or healing rain on top of it, or do AoE frost armor if you put frozen ground on top of it.