Guild Wars 2

IchigoHatake.5098:

What about warriors? They can have berserker stance, dolyak signet, cleansing ire trait, all of which can remove condi quickly, plus thieves have low health, taking away their condi removal means making the class quite under powered.

1. berserker stance takes up a utility slot and has a 60sec cooldown
2. Dolyak Signet doesn’t remove conditions. Duh
3. cleansing ire is a master trait and requires that you first build up adrenaline and then land your burst. This can’t be done every 4secs like thieves entering stealth

I think the problem is not Shadow’s rejuvenation itself but the amount of stealth thieves can easily get. This combined with Shadow’s rejuvenation and in 99% of the cases Shadow’s Embrace as well, makes thieves extremely hard to kill. As pointed out previously not all classes can easily apply aoe damage and thus depend on having a target to deal damage, say you apply an immobilize to finish off a thief in low health, the thief can simply CnD, this will remove the immobilize and let them heal back up with Shadow’s Rejuvenation. I think these two traits are a broken mechanic given the amount of stealth available to thieves. So much condition removal and healing just from being stealthed where they are almost invulnerable is just zero risk and full reward.

If we compare this to for example Healing Signet on warriors (which people have also complained about) you can see the problem.
HS is always active, a warrior can be blocking or using endure pain and this will heal them. Now SR isn’t always active but it can be active for as long a thief wants it to be and not only will they heal for nearly the same amount as HS but it wil also remove conditions with Shadow’s Embrace.
Furthermore a warrior running healing signet is still vulnerable to all damage sources, a warrior using SR is already invulnerable to everything apart from the odd aoe damage that hits them, even if u managed to lay good condition damage simply entering stealth will clean these conditions. HS has absolutely zero condition cleaning .

While healing signet has the highest healing potential of all the three (not counting the new useless heal) warrior healing skills it is easy to counter a warrior using it.

Just applying poison severely reduces its healing output, add a stack of bleeding or two and the warrior is just breaking even, there is a reason why warriors running healing signet are just condimancers food, mending is way better against them and nerfing HS wouldn’t even let the most skilled warrior beat a necro if he gets caught running healing signet.

If you can’t apply conditions then you can exploit the other big weakness of HS: Burst. Warriors running HS are very vulnerable to burst due to its passive nature. It doesn’t provide any meaningful burst heal on demand since the active heal is pitiful. Just burst the warrior down and once he is low in hp he will remain low in hp. If he activates the signet the passive is gone allowing you to finish him and if he doesn’t you can just burst him again and he’s dead (or really even just your auto attack should deal more than 400 dmg if you are not traited for condi dmg).

So to be honest I don’t see how a skill with those big disadvantages can be OP, I think all three warrior heals have advantages and disadvantage. HS is a good skill yes but OP? No.
There is a reason not a single warrior used the skill before it was buffed, back then it was just useles. Right now it’s at a good spot and nerfing it would just make it useless again.

Before the filter gets me im gonna do it myself.
What the kitten has anet been doing all the kittening time since yesterday? it’s been kittening hours since the bug was discovered and reported yet no kitten fix has been kittening released. How much longer must we wait till the kitten fix comes? This is a kitten in the kitten with the kitten of the kitten. Kittening kitten of the kitten!!

I don’t like not being able to defend my towers when outnumbered simply cause i can’t place siege

Same here, sometimes it’s stuck on even though i’ve switched it off and sometimes it won’t switch on….

Ruggan.4102:

or a warrior’s ability to continually fear their opponents

Lol, stopped reading right here

For me that’d have to be protection too, either that or more retaliation to better be able to fight classes like rangers

Kerithlan.1659:

OneBloke.7264:

Today we’ve taken SMC four times and I’ve personally stayed all four times with dozens of other to sweep it thoroughly. I killed quite a few mesmers but then all four times there was suddenly a TC zerg inside the lord room and a few seconds later SMC was lost.
I also heard multiple reports of mesmers going through walls or under the ground but I was always looking for mesmers on the upper parts of the castle so I never saw anything personally.

I’m not gonna say that TC is full of hackers or exploiters, but considering the size of the zerg which kept suddenly appearing in SMC out of thin air taking advantage of this and considering that they did it four times while I was playing….I’ll just say that TC’s gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.
If this is how they’re planning to win this week’s match then it’s really sad because I know that there are a lot of good players and good commanders in TC who are capable of fighting for the first place without resorting to these “tactics”.

And in case someone from Anet reads this I’d like to request that they have a look at what’s happened today and find a fix for it

You guys didn’t repair your walls for like four hours. You don’t need to exploit to knock down walls that are at 10% with no one watching them for upwards of 45 minutes or to break into a tower/keep/castle that has no supplies stored up.

You had like six holes. It wasn’t exploits, it was just a less-than-stellar maintenance job on the castle. It isn’t hard to hide people inside of something as big as Stonemist when there’s doors as wide as highways.

Hmm but how do u explain that literally 1 minute after we’ve captured SMC a TC zerg appears in the lord room? When SMC changes hands all walls and gates are repaired and 1min is not enough time to treb the walls down

Today we’ve taken SMC four times and I’ve personally stayed all four times with dozens of other to sweep it thoroughly. I killed quite a few mesmers but then all four times there was suddenly a TC zerg inside the lord room and a few seconds later SMC was lost.
I also heard multiple reports of mesmers going through walls or under the ground but I was always looking for mesmers on the upper parts of the castle so I never saw anything personally.

I’m not gonna say that TC is full of hackers or exploiters, but considering the size of the zerg which kept suddenly appearing in SMC out of thin air taking advantage of this and considering that they did it four times while I was playing….I’ll just say that TC’s gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.
If this is how they’re planning to win this week’s match then it’s really sad because I know that there are a lot of good players and good commanders in TC who are capable of fighting for the first place without resorting to these “tactics”.

And in case someone from Anet reads this I’d like to request that they have a look at what’s happened today and find a fix for it

This new culling system is a lot worse than the previous one. Please revert it back to the original one as soon as possible.
I’m dying at least twice as often as i used to because by the time i see the enemy zerg they’re already withing melee range and its too late.
I apreciate that you guys are trying to solve this but this new culling trial is a step in the wrong direction

I agree Mesmer portals create whole new strategies in WvW. They keep the game from being predictable and boring

unknown.3972:

The problem is not with the “listening” it is with the “fixing”. On the 15th the loading loop bug returned. Every tournament since then we have had a member or two have to reload during play. This morning 4/5 of our team members had to reload during tournament vs a team with 3 thieves and two bunkers..

This bug drastically alters TPvP and yet has made it 15 days now for something that should have been hot patched on the same day. PvP is BROKEN.. What happened to the GW team that did constant hot patches during release for a lot more minor issues?

They are busy creating pumpkins or karkas or santas or…whatever anet is planning on releasing next

I didn’t see any 2vs1. I’m not trying to be nasty but all i saw was a guy fighting 1vs1 vs the warrior with twilight and another one later vs the asura warrior. And then laughing because he beat them using food and potions while they were not using either of them….

I just checked myself and yeah it seems that the cooldown reduction only works in sPvP (the heart of the mists) while the skill is unaffected by the cooldown reduction in PvE and WvW.

Is this intended? or it’s a bug?

Dear devs
Rock deserves to be nerfed, paper is ok though

Yours,
Scirssors

Hahaha couldn’t help but laugh at Maniac’s post.
Especially becase Tetnis.9137 and other Yak guys keep coming here to cry that FA has been getting huge EU transfers while we lose everything and have the outmanned buff even in our borderlands in NA off-peak hours.

Seriously less QQ more pew pew Yaks. I could start whining here that u guys have just taken everything from us early in the morning (we just lost the garrison fight from Maniac’s screenshot to the endless Yaks zerg) but instead I’ll just look forward to taking it back

Here’s my Female Norn Ele

I agree with the suggestions especially having the items be account bound instead of character bound. I have a lot of karma on my warrior i’d like to spend on some armor for my ele

@Hadan it’s not just organization and strategy. BP clearly has a lot more players than last week AR borderlands’ bay has been defended 24/7 by a large group while still controlling most of Eternal and even having a couple of keeps in GoM borderlands.
No amount of “organization and tactics” would have allowed you to do that in the previous weeks you just didn’t have the manpower back then. So please stop denying that people have been transferring to BP. That you haven’t noticed it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen

You forgot to add
Downed State: Replace skill 2 with Suicide: Pull out a gun and shoot yourself saving the enemies the trouble since there’s nothing else an elementalist can do while downed anyway.

Agreed. By the time DT lands the enemy (even monsters) has already walked out of its landing zone. They dont even need to dodge, just walking is sufficient to evade the skill….

And this is not the only slow skill we have, take flame strike as an example and compare it to other professions #1 skills, flame strike could easily be the slowest of them all

Im also having this error with my character trying to go to divinity’s reach

No you are not the only one. Pretty much every elementalist hates his elite skills (among many other things)

wow hats off to you.
Could you please post your build?

To the OP: Wow excellent post I agree with you. That is exactly how I feel regarding the conjure weapons, they are so situational that I truly feel like we have four utility skills less than all other classes

DrakeWurrum.6049:

You are aware that certain traits play off auras, right?

I am. But like someone said above there are better auras if you want to build for auras. The fact that some traits play off auras doesn’t change the fact that the skill is worthless.
They should completely redesign the skill. Something I’d like to see there instead:

Flame Shield:
X Damage (an amount at least close to fire grab from the dagger OH)

Burning: 6 seconds (Or just make the instant damage equal to fire grab’s and remove burning altogether, we have enough ways to cause burning using S/F already anyway )

Knockdown: 2 seconds

This is what elementalists’ skills should do, encourage players to avoid getting hit, not the opposite.

To the OP, sorry im going off-topic. I just couldn’t help mentioning this skill because, as I said, I use focus all the time and this skill really bothers me

Winds.3087:

OneBloke.7264:

Haha I’ve already written this on the suggestions forum. They really handicapped the elementalist with this skill, it’s perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game…..I so much hope Anet will get rid of this skill and put something useful there

Honestly, get at least 10 points in air, grab Zephyr’s Boon and suddenly this useless skill will grant you fury and swiftness.

I’m glad you mentioned this. So basically we elementalists have to use our skill#5 (which is normally a major damage/CC ability on all other classes) AND on top of that spend 10 trait points to get two boons for 5 seconds….while other professions such as mesmers get boons by just spamming their default attack skill……

Moocow.2415:

This awful, awful skill is a large reason as to why I don’t take the focus seriously. It’s a complete waste of a weapon skill. The damage done is pitiful, it lasts for a very short time, and it offers no defensive bonuses. I’d rather spend my time trying to not get hit than waste it casting this.

Haha I’ve already written this on the suggestions forum. They really handicapped the elementalist with this skill, it’s perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game…..I so much hope Anet will get rid of this skill and put something useful there

To be honest Air staff skills are the very reason why I don’t use the staff

I hope someone from Anet comes by and takes a look at your suggestions, I couldn’t agree more with this

1.Our traits need to be reworked (Someone has started a thread with suggestions on this) so that you benefit from them regardless of your element attunement. As they are you receive benefits only while you are attuned to a specific element. In a class where you have to be swapping elements all the time this is not very helpful. Basically your traits help you only 25% of the time…..yes even Grandmaster traits only help you 25% of the time.

2. I have posted this already somewhere else but in case someone from Anet comes over here I’ll post it again:

OneBloke.7264:

The focus should have a healing skill on water attunement but most importantly the fire focus skills are utterly useless:

Flame Wall: Damage almost non existent and it causes burning for one second, yes for one second to a target which is probably burning already from Flame Strike or Dragon’s Tooth.

Fire Shield: Perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game as I said on another thread. Puts up a shield which lasts for 3 seconds during this time if someone attacks you they will get burning for 1 second. Yes you read properly, as if burning from Flame Strike, Dragon’s Tooth and Flame Wall was not enough Fire Shield gives you the chance to burn your enemy for whole full second holy cow!

So yeah the focus has some nice defensive abilities but its fire skills are worthless, I really wish they implement a decent offensive skill for the focus on fire attunement. Isn’t attack what the fire attunement is supposed to be about? I’m sure more people would begin to use it if they made this change.

It would also be nice if they added one defensive skill for the dagger under earth, this would also make the dagger more appealing. As it is now the focus is all about defensive and nothing and the dagger all about offensive but no defensive skills.
These change would make both weapons more balanced and start to add actual versatility to the elementalist

Yeah elementalist’s traits are horrible, the main reason for that being that almost all of the traits affect one single attunement. In a class where you need to be constantly swapping attunements to stay alive this is not very useful. Take fire, nearly all of the fire traits give you bonuses only while you are attuned to fire and as soon as you swap to a different attunement they are all gone.

Seriously Drunken Monkey.2653:

2) A trait that encourages using a Focus as an Offhand-Item. At the moment everyone uses Dagger on Offhand, but a good (creative) trait might change that.

I actually use a focus 90% of the time for all those defensive skills on earth and air, I understand, however why so few people use it and I wish someone from Arena Net read this:
The focus should have a healing skill on water attunement but most importantly the fire focus skills are utterly useless:

Flame Wall: Damage almost non existent and it causes burning for one second, yes for one second to a target which is probably burning already from Flame Strike or Dragon’s Tooth.

Fire Shield: Perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game as I said on another thread. Puts up a shield which lasts for 3 seconds during this time if someone attacks you they will get burning for 1 second. Yes you read properly, as if burning from Flame Strike, Dragon’s Tooth and Flame Wall was not enough Fire Shield gives you the chance to burn your enemy for whole full second holy cow!

So yeah the focus has some nice defensive abilities but its fire skills are worthless, I really wish they implement a decent offensive skill for the focus on fire attunement. Isn’t attack what the fire attunement is supposed to be about? I’m sure more people would begin to use it if they made this change.
For now I’ll just watch my poor foes suffer for that full second…..

I agree, their downed skills are lame. I think a possible solution would be adding interrupt to skill#2

Flavius.9580:

Actually, Elementalists are better than warriors in WvW, where melee is merely cannon fodder.

You know that warriors can use rifles and longbows, right?

I agree with pretty much everything which has been said here: the elites are awful, the traits are a mess, the damage/survival ratio is the worst of any class and the conjure skills feel like the developers didn’t know how to fill our utility skills so they just created random, useless things. I mean does anyone here actually use the frost bow? the earth shield? how about the flame axe???
I think our CC skills are not so bad though.
Now I’d like to add a few things which I consider should be looked into.

First our underwater skills are simply useless, I’m completely stuck on the story mission which takes u to some underwater cathedral in the straits of devastation. I can’t kill anything, I haven’t played today though so I might be able to complete the mission now that we have whirlpool.

Second (and it has already been mentioned on many posts so I won’t go into detail here) our downed state is worthless.

Third: the OP mentioned animation times for AOE attacks but i think this goes to many other skills as well. I usually play scepter/focus and sometimes scepter/dagger.
Now lets see fire attunement is supposed to be the high damage attunement, right?
Well what have we got with a staff/focus combination? Flame strike has an animation of approximately two seconds before it actually hits (causing very little damage) a thief using skill #1 with dual daggers can hit three times in two seconds and cause at least twice as more damage.
Dragon’s tooth takes even longer to land, it takes so long that unless i use immobilize via signet of earth (which has a long cooldown and makes me lose the passive effect) on the target monster it never hits unless it’s a ranged monster. Phoenix animation is fine but here comes the worst part:

Fourth: some weapon sets of skills have an awful trade-off. As a player I’m always facing the decision whether to use focus or dagger in my offhand. The dagger has some nice offensive skills (fire grab, Ride the lightning+updraft combo). Earthquake, however, takes so long to cast that by the time it’s done u are nearly dead if there are more than a monster around. However the dagger completely lacks any defensive skill. Two or three ranged enemies attacking you? you better run or you are dead meat. Why not make one of the earth skills a defensive one? Earthquake takes so long to be cast that it’s basically useless, I’d take a projectile reflection/destruction skill or protection over it without thinking twice.
Now what if I use the focus? the focus has some really cool defensive skills, you can knockdown enemies or destroy projectiles on air attunement, you can daze and chill them on water (I’d like a heal here though) and you have two awesome earth skills to reflect projectiles and become invulnerable for a couple of seconds. Ok that’s a lot of defensive skills so one would expect some offensive skills on fire, right? Not quite.
Flame wall’s damage is close to zero and the burning effect you can get it by simply using Flame strike but it remains a tiny bit useful thanks to its combo effect. But what about Fire Shield? why did they have to ruin the focus leaving it without a single offensive skill? Why dear god the dagger has no defensive skills and the focus no offensive ones? Fire shield lasts for three seconds during which it will cause burning for one second to enemies which are probably already burning anyway from flame strike or dragon’s tooth. This is perhaps the most useless skill in the entire game and ruins your offensive capabilities if you choose to use a scepter/focus combination.

So basically when I’m using scepter/dagger my offensive skills are decent so long as there are no more than 2 enemies at which point I’d need some defensive skills which I don’t have access to. And if I’m running scepter/focus I have more survivability but thanks to long animations and lack of offensive skills other than those of the scepter I kill everything very slowly…..

What do you people think? Do you agree? Or do you have workarounds to this?

I Agree with the OP. I hate this map because of the sharks. It would be great if they removed it

Vayra.3290:

OneBloke.7264:

His ele is lvl 80 and he played ele during the BWEs as well, so basically he’s an experienced player who knows what he’s doing.
My thief was around lvl 17 and I had played around 20 PvP games with him…..so you can imagine I was (And I’m still) far from being a Pro thief.

And even though he did win the duel, it took him close to three full minutes to bring my thief down, yes it takes a decent ele player close to three minutes to kill a noob thief, that’s just how bad elementalists are at the moment. The class simply doesn’t reward your skills as a player with good results, it simply awards excellent gameplay with the results anyone can get easily playing other classes.

What weapon was he using? I’m finding it hard to believe a D/D ele would take 3 mins to kill a thief (and D/D is what you should be using for 1v1 and spvp in general imo), I kill most thieves in 5-10s if I get a crit on Burning Speed and/or Flame Grab, a bit longer if not. The only classes I’ve fought on that timescale was a fully defensive specced staff ele (probably 30water/30 earth or similar) and some seriously defensive guardians (ie point defense classes who are just trying to keep me occupied so I’m not a threat elsewhere).

I won’t claim to be a super pro ele, but I can deal with most people 1v1 if I see them coming. Melee thieves are some of the easier kills for me so long as I have a stun break off cd as if they want to kill me fast they have to be squishy, and I can dodge or otherwise avoid the majority of their burst damage while unloading my own. I’m honestly not sure how much health such a thief has, but I can deal upwards of 12-15k damage at the start of the fight, and add another 5k or so + a rather large amount of bleed stacks a bit later, cast just after a knockdown + cripple. A good thief can of course avoid a large part of this damage, but that requires dodging the CC that comes before it or using their CC breaks early, in which case it’s easy for me to save it and unload it a little bit later.

In the end, elementalists are probably the hardest class to play at a high level, which makes them seem less powerful to less experienced players who have not learned the ins and outs of the classes yet. And tbh I would be very sad if the elementalist was buffed for the inexperienced people and as a result be either grossly OP at a high level or dumbed down so that the difference between a good and bad elementalist is on the same scale as warriors.

He was using a staff. I’m not exactly a pro but from what i can tell he countered my burst very well and his attunement dancing was on spot, i thought i was gonna win after i used my elite (the 2 thieves) but with armor of earth plus the staff heal he made it through and wore me down in the next 2 minutes

@ Arheundel.6451
Yes thats exactly what i did, when i noticed things were going downhill i just used shadow refuge and get healed (theres a trait for that). After that i was nearly fully healed and i could start with unload or steal+spider venom and this would make him go into defense+heal mode again that’s why the battle dragged on for so long

I would like to post a personal experience here to illustrate the current state of the elementalist.
My main is an elementalist but I play a thief and a warrior occasionally, in PvP, however, I never take my ele because I know I’m in for a beating.
So I was talking to a lvl 80 elementalist who, although he agreed with me that eles need a serious buff, he claimed to be a pretty good ele and do decently in PvP.
We decided to look for an empty PvP server and have a duel so he could teach me a few things and help me improve my ele gameplay in PvP.

His ele is lvl 80 and he played ele during the BWEs as well, so basically he’s an experienced player who knows what he’s doing.
My thief was around lvl 17 and I had played around 20 PvP games with him…..so you can imagine I was (And I’m still) far from being a Pro thief.

And even though he did win the duel, it took him close to three full minutes to bring my thief down, yes it takes a decent ele player close to three minutes to kill a noob thief, that’s just how bad elementalists are at the moment. The class simply doesn’t reward your skills as a player with good results, it simply awards excellent gameplay with the results anyone can get easily playing other classes.

And before anyone asks why I still play my ele, I do it because I have fun with it in PvE I like having the possibility to switch attunements and have a completely new set of skills, I like the idea of having to concentrate and actually use strategy to stay alive when more than a monster are attacking me.

One of the many reasons why I always use my thief in pvp instead of my main (ele).
If my thief is downed:
1. I have a decent #1 Skill to attack and hope I kill someone so I rally.
2. If the enemy is trying to stomp me I can use skill #2 to simply teleport somewhere else where there might be allies to help me back up or where the enemy might not see me or lose interest and go somewhere he is needed urgently.
3. Right before they finish the stomping animation I can pop skill #3 and go invisible making their stomp miss and laugh on their faces and hope again that an ally happens to pass by or that they go to capture/defend some place.

On my ele….the #1 attack is lame, skill number 2 is useless if the enemy killed u in melee and skill #3 takes centuries to come out of cooldown so basically downed=dead

I enjoy playing my elementalist, she’s fun, i like having 20 skills to choose from I like the fast paced gameplay I’m forced into if I want to stay alive. Yes,her damage output is low compared to nearly every other class but that won’t change the fact that I enjoy playing her and I think that’s the reason why there are so many out there. In PvP I always use my thief or my warrior though. It’s just depressing getting killed 8-10 times while killing perhaps just one enemy I was lucky to find with less than 30% health

I agree. While I enjoy playing my elementalist. I just feel dissapointed when I compare her to my thief. It takes me 8-10 seconds to kill a monster unless I use up all my burst and send the skills into long cooldowns whereas my thief kills most monsters in 2-3 skills using lower quality gear.
And this is using full +power+precision+crit damage rare gear and trait points in fire magic.
My survablity is fine if I’m concentrated and kite/use deffensive skills properly but the damage output just doesnt compensate for her poor armor and health.

I really hope Arena Net will take a look at the current state of the elementalist and give us a damage buff or improve out skills/traits

I would like to bring to the developers’ attention a minor typing mistake in the description of the item Minor Rune of Holding.
The description reads “Used to craft 8 slot bags, boxes and packs”. However this item is used to craft 10 slot containers, not 8 slot ones.
8 slot containers don’t need runes.

Agreed, those skills are indeed useless i hardly ever use water attunement. Instead i swap to earth attunement, use obsidian flesh or put up rock barrier and hope that by the time they wear off the foe is dead. Pretty sad indeed.

And a bit off-topic, is it just me or the conjure weapon skills are also pretty useless?