Showing Posts For Rack.4930:
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It took till level 72 at least but this is a story mission underwater. As an Elementalist I have exactly 1 attack that works underwater and it’s on a 3 minute cool down. Theoretically I might be able to get through this if I alt-tab out every few minutes to read a book or something but given all the crap story missions pull out on land it’s entirely possible after seven hours or so I’ll hit a brick wall. Is this mission even possible?
Hmm, no details yet. I guess they’re yet to announce their 20 hour event that can only be done on Xmas day to get gear absolutely necessary to play all stages of future content.
I already have, and was forced to rescind those recommendations. Fortunately everyone realised I made them in good faith. I’d originally called it an MMO without the grind but I just can’t hold on to that without a wishy-washy “doesn’t really have too bad a grind at the moment and the devs insist it won’t get one but then they claimed all gear would be even and they went back on that 3 months in. It comes down to trust and I can’t see any reason to do so. Maybe give it a go but don’t get your hopes up”
Oh no, I went through 3 hours of that garbage, if I found out I could just have played an hour of regular Guild Wars 2 for the same effect I might cry.
Definitely a good idea, or at the very least set zone scaling so you have an amount of players and mobs the system can handle. Have multiple angles to deal with at once, don’t just have a 3000 player zerg that completely crushes your game design.
I got about 8s and a 20 slot bag for my time and it was a crappy, crappy event. Don’t feel too bad about missing out, it’s all luck of the draw.
Not to mention if you do get 2 hours of personal time a day (really it is a lot) then that means you are dedicating 100% of your free time to a single game. That’s pretty hardcore…
I have literally no idea why they are trolling us like this. An event you don’t want to miss… on Friday night?
I kind of do want to miss this because for some weird reason I’m actually busy on what is universally the busiest night of the week.
Lets look at the impact here.
MF gear gives more of the cake to
Gold Farmers
Skilled Players
Greedy Players
Rich Players
The only arguable advantage, and I hope the reason for its existence, is to let players set their own difficulty to some degree in exchange for more loot. If you are finding your own missions too easy then drop the advantage from your gear to get more mf. A less skilled player attempting this will lose money from the increase in repair costs.
While I don’t particularly like it as a mechanic the thing that gets me is the numbers involved. +3.5% life or +30% mf… is that supposed to be a choice? I mean I realise that mf find gear has to get more magic than it itself costs but the amount of mf keeps going up as you level as if anet don’t realise it scales intrinsically. Why do you get more magic find as you level?
I recognise why this can’t happen, if nothing else a lot of people will have rolled elementalist because it has the most complicated skill rotations, it just struck me as an interesting idea for a class, weapon, trait or other option. If there are changes down the line that make the elementalist viable as a tactical role changer I imagine they will be in the form of trait that provide scaling benefits.
Within the current framework it seems like Elementalist flexibility is going to be a rough deal. How do you make a skillset that is balanced for staying in for several minutes and dropping into for 2.5 seconds? It might be straight up possible without any mechanical alterations but I suspect not.
So what's the reasoning behind nerfing us even further underwater?
in Elementalist
Posted by: Rack.4930
It really WAS overpowered, especially in PVP. I don’t see why they couldn’t apply a severe cooldown reduction on it to compensate though.
This is a major change so I don’t expect it to actually happen, but I found I liked the idea so I wanted to know what other people thought.
At the moment our “versatility” comes from having access to 20 skills. In practise this amounts to a complicated rotation. Now I’m sure some people get along with this really well, but I’m a bit disappointed that it doesn’t pan out the way I envisaged. Rather than swapping tactically between the elements I find myself using ALL the skills to stay alive.
Instead I wondered if the attunement cooldowns were reversed, how this would affect play? So at the moment if I swap from Earth to Fire it puts earth on a 15 sec cooldown and water and air on a 1 second cooldown. But what if swapping to Fire put Earth on a 10 second cooldown and Water and Air on a 1 minute cooldown?
This is clearly a pretty huge nerf but to counter it we could get proper weapon skills, with decent cooldowns and autoattacks. Swapping to Air would be a tactical decision, “do I need that mobility for this fight?”, rather than, I’m done with Fire, might as well apply a blind before dropping to Earth. The flip side is in any one combat we would have the fewest options of any class (Except an Engineer with no kits)
What do I love?
Glyph of Storms. Probably next in line for a nerf, Glyph of Storms is completely amazing in PVE. It blinds and reapplies for about 15 seconds in Earth and does very respectable damage in other elements. Brilliant, skill, great fun to use and really feels it earns the long cooldown it has.
Ease of removing conditions when specced in water. As an S/D it feels great to blow off a condition just by swapping to water, and having access to a second condition removal spell on 5.
What do I hate?
We have abilities with longer animations than some films. It really sucks to fire off some attacks, your opponent kills you, wanders way slowly and then an attack lands in the space where he was. If a crippled enemy can just walk out of the blast of an attack then that attack should be bloody spectacular, not “eh, alright”
Our downed state. We just don’t have one. Doesn’t seem quite right somehow.
Our underwater combat. We just don’t have one. Doesn’t seem right somehow.
I go Thief. Technically I don’t have a problem with Eles at the moment. We’re pretty decent in WvW, you get autolevelled/geared in SPVP anyway so can freely switch classes, open world PVE is easy enough not to cause a real issue the only problem is Dungeons and I really don’t enjoy those with any class.
I would on my Warrior, Signet of everything is amazing. To be honest I’d use Glyph of Elementals fairly often as well, but would appreciate the opportunity to swap it out.
I dunno, at the moment I’m playing Ele because he’s my highest level toon and at present has the greatest gold income potential. As long as that remains true and as long as I don’t have the 6-7gold needed to buy my last 2 character slots I’ll play him. Then I’ll bench him until they get fixed, if that’s never, well, pity because I like the idea and the gameplay style.
I found hyper inflation benefits everyone, except the developers who find it harder to sell gold and make the game a chore. (And thus retain players who might otherwise see everything and move on). If platinum ore was worth 2 silver and so on you could trivialise the gold sinks and thus actually play the game instead of grind, grind, grind, bit of WvW; grind grind, grind, dungeon; grind, grind, grind explore the world.
Still, for the time being the low conversion makes buying character slots and the like via gold practical so it’s not too bad.
It really reminds me of how Shaman were for a long time in WoW. All other classes would say they don’t need a buff while they underperformed in everything and lost their utility to other classes [time warp mage, paladin/hunter buff overlaps].
Hmm, my overwhelming memory of WoW in the early days was Shaman being the best class and getting buff after buff after buff.
Anyway from what I understand Eles got a big nerf just before release and it’s more common for developers to overnerf then correct than to do a death by paper cuts. Given what Anet said before about waiting on class balance I’d expect further changes in the medium term. The pessimist in me is struggling not to think they will further nerf Ele and buff Thief, Warrior and Guardian though.
Most effective use I can find is to hit F1, they seem to do a lot more damage then.
There have been several difficulty spikes in my personal story and fortunately this wasn’t as brutal as the (apparently edited) Dead of Winter quest but still felt fairly extreme. Actually getting through the normal enemies felt extremely tough but the largest spike seemed to be fighting The Eye of Zhaitan. One of its moves allegedly causes Confusion. I say allegedly because as an Elementalist it would kill me in the blink of an eye. I had just about enough time to initiate one dodge roll before dying.
If I had a better indication this was what was happening I could have disabled auto attack (though the interaction between confusion and auto attack seems strained at best.) but as was it just seemed to fire an ability and then I immediately died. Fortunately after a few attempts my Elementals and Traehaerne manage to take it down, where upon I faced the final enemy… who died very quickitteno a very basic strategy which didn’t require me to use any of my utilities. I’m not saying after all that I was wanting a brutal challenge, within context it was somewhat of a relief to get an easy fight, but it was strange it was SO much easier than even the average enemy.
The reasoning behind this is pretty apparent, you can buy keys in the gem store but not chests. For this reason I don’t think Anet would ever add anything you could do with them to break that ratio, just more things to make them tempting to open. As it stands I opened 3 of them, got some decentish stuff (Black Lion Salvage kit being probably the best) and then forgot about it.
One thing I think would be nice is if they buffed the tonics. If they were PVE only, didn’t work in dungeons and added perma swiftness and mob ignore traits I’d be wanting to use them pretty constantly as is I used 3 of them experimenting ankittenempted to throw the rest away.
Simple solution. Turn off autotarget. It makes the game a lot easier to play.
The word you are looking for is harder. I need my mouse for mouse look, I can’t be clicking on targets every 2 seconds.
What gear to pick? Now how would we go about that? I tend to find I get what I’m given.
When it does get ridiculous in story missions I strip naked and use Lava Tomb. That and Glyph of Storms (Protip: Glyph of Storms is AMAZING in PVE, either in Earth for aoe stacking blind or anything else for impressive damage) gets me through most anything except some of the more psychotically unbalanced bosses and traps.
In general Ele is an uncomfortable learning curve. Way too many of our abilities are highly situational at best, combine that with being incredibly easy to kill and it makes for a brutal learning curve. When you get through the other side it isn’t pretty and we still have some very severe weaknesses but I haven’t found it so bad yet. On the other hand I’ve just hit level 56 and am about to brave the level 55 zones. This may be where it all goes wrong…
Not a bad idea, I like the idea of it being a glyph more than anything else. Unfortunately it’s probably a huge undertaking to balance it. My preference would be to use the mechanic already established in traits like One With Air. You don’t get quite the flexibility of other classes but it seems like it would be more practical to balance than this.
What I tend to notice is if they aren’t against the wall that sequence will take an enemy from full health to 98% health. At which point since you’ve moved they’ll become invulnerable and reset to full health.
I’m an Elementalist so Whirlpool will be an option once I’ve raised the 40 (!) skill points it costs but that means I can kill one mob every 3 minutes. It’s an improvement I guess, and an infinite one at that but still hardly comparable with my land skill set. Still ANet should have figured out that underwater levels along with sewer levels, slippy slidey ice worlds and reverse the controls power ups are reviled for a very good reason.
I’m a little confused here. You say the multiple guild system plus represent system is crippling smaller guilds, but imagine what would happen if it wasn’t there. All the people who aren’t representing you would leave and you wouldn’t have a guild at all.
There could be mechanics to support this better but the fundamental idea seems sound.
Oh god don’t even get me started on dungeon costs, I don’t even think about touching those any more. They really, really need to have some way to mitigate the costs in dungeons considering how little you make in return.
I have played a Guardian underwater, they’re amazing. Our CC amounts to 4 seconds of stun every minute, far far worse than what we can manage on land, even excepting there’s no way to leverage it. Maybe if I get hold of some +healing I’ll have a chance. The other problem is I have so many considerations for utility skills. I need Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast and Signet of Fire to get some semblance of damage, but I also need Armour of Earth, Mist Form and Arcane Shield to get some kind of defense. But they’re so ill designed for what I’m using them for they all of them put together aren’t as useful as Glyph of Storms.
The one overwhelming outstanding issue I’m still having with my Elementalist at the moment is underwater combat. I’m just really, really really bad at it. I picked up a rare trident of my level to try and mitigate this but I still find all of my attacks do nothing. Water is allegedly one of the strongest but I find it knocks barely a sliver off enemies around my level. To make matters worse pretty much every single utility of any worth, all my traits, and all the elites (until I can muster 40 trait points to buy whirlpool) seem to be barred from me. Has anyone found anything that helps?
Ouch, that’s pretty bad. What level did your money worries show up? Thus far I found things got pretty easy since 40 but I have heard things get tougher in later zones. I think the TP costs do need to go down though, it was way more fun to be able to zing around the map doing whatever I felt like, as opposed to trudging up and down worrying about every silver it costs.
Setting aside balancing issues. I’d like to see traits designed to encourage you to not swap elements when you have abilities on cooldown. So if I want to do area damage, I swap to Fire and stay there. If I want to support I swap to Water and stay there. If I want to do single target damage and kite I swap to Air and stay there. If I’m up against a lot of hard to avoid damage I swap to Earth and stay there. Make the elements options rather than one great long rotation.
Honestly I think it needs more work than I can justify here.
Add a scaling cooldown reduction trait (equivalent to One with Air et al) that takes a long time to build up and resets whenever you swap attunements when one of them is on cooldown. This is to enable a playstyle that uses element swap to respond to situations as opposed to having a huge list of attacks to reel off.
Rescale the auto attacks so every attunement in every weapon set is a valid choice to stay in. Apply buffs/bug fixes to some of the dead skills.
Speed up the animation on our big hitters, at least to the point where avoiding them takes some kind of effort, or at least is worthwhile.
Underwater summons. Underwater glyph of storms (centered on player). An underwater elite that can be accessed without spending 50 points. Add some decent conditions and fields to our underwater skills and generally buff the hell out of underwater.
Add some kind of weapon swap or some kind of improvement to summoned weapons. Right now Elementalists are about the least flexible class.
Completely redesign the downed state. Maybe shift 2 to 3 and add a knockback skill to 2? Or maybe have 2 be a really big dragons tooth effect that forces badly wounded players to back off or risk being downed? Something so we don’t just automatically die to a crippled chilled immobilised enemy on 3hp.
There’s more, really its a lot of little fixes to mean our abilities work and we can leverage them consistently. As a band aid they could overbuff our downed state (really badly desperately needs work anyway) and then bring it back down when they fix everything else.
Some professions have better speed boosts than others. Equality would be nice.
-Slow Engineer
Slow Engineer? You do realise Engineers have the easiest access to Perma Swiftness of any class in the game?
Game design and theory is far more complicated that what you are giving it, it must have a time sink to build a community. It must have consequences for actions, inconvenience for helping… etc… I would probably give that some thought if I didn’t understand it.
What? No, just no, seriously no. Just no. Time sinks? Inconveniences? No, these are just flat out poor or off kilter design decisions. Bad game design bad!
That aside I’d say mounts would be nice but low priority. Democratise swiftness out of combat and reduce the scaling of waypoints and then focus on the important aspects.
(edited by Rack.4930)
Best. World design in 1-25 zones. It’s ridiculously beautiful,
Worst. Dungeons. Specifically that they require pulling even at the easiest difficulty. I’d prefer if this were a non consideration (mobs have something approaching AI in dungeons and won’t just stand at you looking dumbfounded from 200ft away as you wail on their friends) but at the very least a difficulty setting where it was reasonable to fight them in the numbers they spawn in. This wouldn’t be so bad if there was anything to do other than dynamic events at any stage in the game.
Screw it, I’m going to throw in some addendums
Great. Action based combat design that really works. Early access to core abilities.
Poor. Frequency of Dynamic Events in later zones. Number of gold sinks.
Fire 20 trait gives you 10 more charges on it, that’s quite a buff to duration. Also do you know about the scepter might trick? I found that gave me really impressive damage without the hammer (or supplemented it nicely) Ring of Fire, Phoenix, Dragons Tooth, Earthquake. 9 stacks of might straight off the bat.
Scepter/Dagger all the way. Staff is good in grroups but bad for getting credit in groups. Still not a fan of dungeons, not high enough level for WvW (Maybe if I bought level 80 gear I could use it? hmm.) so Scepter Dagger is the perfect choice for me, great AoE, good single target, decent support. If I could swap out easily I’d try staff but if I get in a tough situation I end up faceplanting.
I mentioned this earlier in chat, but just so this isn’t hanging Quick Glyphs is a 10 Air trait, Inscription is a 20 Air trait and Elemental Attunement a level 10 arcane trait.
Chain it all together in Earth and you can get 23 seconds protection, which is long enough to rechain some skills into 34 seconds protection. I wouldn’t recommend that kind of monomania, it can be interrupted and you’ll eventually stall but the net effect is a (relatively) pleasing amount of survivability in PVE.
I have a shiny gold coin.
this thread is funny as all get out you must love being in a constant downed state with abilities that do nothing and spending TONS of gold to fix your items every second. Ele is ruined for me I loved it is GW1 but they screwed us hard core in GW2
I rarely properly ‘Die’ to the point that my items need to be repaired…. When i start to drop health, I switch to my ice attunement and heal myself, or use some of my skills.
Elementalist is challenging. But the abilities certainly do damage. I think they raised the skillcap ball in Guild Wars 2.
I think he was talking about downed state abilities, which, yeah, if you haven’t got Lava Tomb traited then if you haven’t applied enough bleeds or summoned an appropriate elemental then your odds of getting up are slender at best.
Fortunately I’ve gotten to the point where I’d actually be looking at getting the monthly survival ability on my Elementalist if it wasn’t bugged. That’s using Earth state as a defensive rather than Water though, I find Water is only worth a quick stop no matter what weapons I have equipped. In Earth? Blind everything, add armour of earth and protection and my hp actually go UP in a semi-protracted fight against multiple enemies. Even my Guardian can’t manage that.
SInce I hit 40 I kind of do. It’s annoying that I need to use so many buttons to do anything and I still have to do everything overlevelled but the Inscription trait is giving me the flexibility I chose Elementalist for in the first place.
Oh PVE only of course, if I do SPVP I get with the program and use a Thief. Number 2, like a boss!
I’m not sure you should ignore fire just like that, it’s all damage but you can mitigate that a lot with your utilities and traits. For myself, until I hit a higher level anyway, I’m finding inscription, quick glyphs and elemental attunement invaluable. They add huge amounts of protection, regeneration and switftness as and when I need it. The abilities they are stacked on are great and I really don’t feel so squishy when standing in the middle of an earthern glyph of storms with 9s protection, 22s regeneration and all of my attacks adding chilled, weakness or crippled as the situation demands.
Lots of good ideas here. Personally I find my biggest concern is that it isn’t worth sacrificing a much needed utility skill for. Engineers get bonus Fx skills on their kits, maybe we could get something similar to Necromancers summons? If you double press the skill it uses up the remaining charges to generate a scaling effect.
No, I just fight higher level mobs. I don’t like the Guardian because he lacks tricks but I enjoy all the other classes, I just have to fight enemies a few levels higher, or with old weapons.
It’s a good point, but a little self defeating. Obviously Anet do care that you keep playing. They want you to buy gems, when they launch an expansion they want you to think “awesome, more stuff for the game I’m playing” not “oh yeah I remember that, game, it was fun wasn’t it?”
The idea that it wouldn’t be a grind, well, that was just marketing. It’s less of a grind because they only want you to keep playing, and don’t particularly care how much but it is unavoidably a grind because of Anets external motivations.
Can’t seem to quote, but I’m not surprised the top and bottom levels are the unhappiest. It takes barely any time to hit level 11, so if someone is still in that range they can’t be enjoying the game. On the flip side there isn’t really any traditional end-game content so people who rushed through to 80 are likely to be feeling disappointed. That won’t be all 80s but at the moment it will be a significant portion of them.
For now I’m glad of this, and I’m hoping I can buy a load of character slots and bank space before the prices stabilise and that becomes impossible.
im lvl 36 and i cant afford any good item. repairing equipment is expansive,traveling too, i cant afford any rare part. if arenanet is trying to make me buy gems,it might make me buy gold. u said its 1 time pay and u lied like all mmo developers. without pumping euros in ur pockets its impossible to play.
ill quit or ill buy gold,tyvm
Considering Arenanet sell gold… Mission accomplished?
Okay I’ll try and be helpful here. I just bought a full set of Masterwork level 40 cloth gear for about 20 copper over vendor prices. The total cost was a few silver which I’ll make back most of when I vendor them. I also managed to pick up a few % of magic find so odds are this will actually make me money. Rares are, well, rare. You don’t need them, if you find them they’re a great source of income.
Apart from that gather everything and sell some of the stuff you don’t use. If you aren’t dying left and right the only thing that’s actually too expensive is travelling, and I’m afraid that’s working as intended. Anet are after our money when it comes right down to it.
(edited by Rack.4930)
@Rack. I think what they considered “Ranged” for daggers are the many gap closing skills it has, in all fairness though any class that uses a dagger doesn’t have a far ranged spell for that dagger.
Exactly my point. Other classes have gap closers on their melee weapons, but if they are in a situation they need to back off and attack from range they swap to another weapon. Elementalists can’t do that, they are locked into short range combat. Despite the large number of skills they are amongst the least versatile professions.
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