Guild Wars 2

I logged in to say how awful your “balance” decisions are, and people like you are exactly why people with legitimately good balance ethos’ are ignored.

This this thread pains me to read. Before you dismiss me as abusive, there is a huge mega thread detailing real problems and things that should happen with the class. People are still bad, and no, I will not elaborate, because I’m tired of bad players.

I spent over two years telling people to get good at the Ele class, and got nothing but hatred. It’s the opposite deal here. The class seemed incredibly op at launch, people cried, got nerfed. What happened? People learned to play with their brain and now rev is easily exploitable. Run hard cc or condition or both and revs are free food. Rev has this design and for the right reasons. You want stun breakers? Run shiro. Want to stand a chance against conditions? Rin mallyx. It’s a perfect system as it is an has the perfect trade offs. When bugs are fixed, of course.

TLDR- Bad balance suggestions. Facets with cast time? Mallyx boon corruption? Jeez. Completely killing the flow of a class and making one legend really strong? Yes, you heard me, mallyx is better than Shiro.

Jonathan Sharp. I am directing this at you personally because of your position, and because you have the power. There is so much I would like to say to you regarding this game, but to be honest, it would take me days of typing; and you reading, to convey my thoughts. I will try to keep this as brief. Before you dismiss me, please, take a while to read through this and appreciate my thoughts. I used to be very active here, but once I realised it was futile, I took a break from the forums, and the game, for 7 months. I understand FULLY, EVERY aspect that you have to deal with, truthfully.

I was a hardcore GW1 player. Since my departure from the scene, I have eagerly awaiting GW2. I changed my alias, and have two active alternate GW2 accounts. One for PvP, one for PvE and WvW. This is not a topic about rose tinted memories, this is the opposite. I have one question for you, personally.

Why?

It’s a very vague question of course, but that’s the point. Everything in this game, is vague. The balance, the skills, the pros, the cons, the whiners, the glorifiers. Why is there so much segregation?

Before I start, let me tell you, that I’ve wholeheartedly agreed with mostly every decision you’ve ever made, from a business point of view, and a player’s point of view. Unfortunately for the playerbase, most of us do not see outside of our tunnel-visioned glasses, or are able to see the picture. We know why the state of the game is the way it is, and why the business model is the way it is. However, the game is to be played. Why is it that you are unable to make a few changes that will satisfy nearly everyone that will not affect the business model?

Living Story

Please, stop wasting our time, and more importantly- YOUR TIME, by developing these two week events. Not only does it encourage the wrong sort of behaviour from players, and for those are couldn’t participate, it most likely will kitten off the entire of your team. You are no doubt wasting money by doing this.

I am by no means saying elimate the living story short term content, but slow it down. If you are going to proceed with them, do not do them so frequently. Do not make them last so short. Content should be a permanent addition, and living story style events should take place for big, and MAJOR things that need to take place. Just because the living story contains the events after the Zhaitan incident, doesn’t mean it has to be time-gated, in short intervals. You can add permanent content that encourages players to move forward to the events, and not the events to come to the players. This is why GW1’s PvE mode worked so well for the most part.

Guys. Come on now. The class has literally been out for a few days and you’re already pulling insane changes to the class?

The class itself is supposed to be energy based. That’s the whole design mechanic. What’s the point of slapping cooldowns on abilities so we have two things to worry about? This is seriously just a L2P issue. Nerfing glints heal too? Yeah because the ability already wasn’t bad and required the stupidity of your opponent to function.

Yes, the class has good damage-to-survivability ratio, but let’s look at what it doesn’t have:

- Dies to any condition pressure. If you can’t figure this one out, then you literally shouldn’t be preparing to comment.
- VERY lackluster heals and BAD healing scaling
- Ventari’s tablet is a joke. All the skills should be instant cast so you use them while fighting. The heals and the placement of the fragments are NOT good enough to warrant you becoming a sitting duck
- No mobility outside of Shiro
- Still bugs everywhere.

To summarise, the class has nothing outside of a less warrior-like survivability and damage ratio. Balancing should be done based on the energy mechanic, not slapping cooldowns and nerfing already bad heals.

-Phase traversal should have had an increase to 25 energy.
-Infuse light should not have been changed at all, and needed a base heal increase, and better healing scaling. This goes for all the healing lines, and abilities. At 1200 healing power I get less than half (at best) on all the healing abilities. The only ability that has decent scaling is shield 5. Ventari’s tablet could do with better scaling, but is clunky as hell due to the casting times, which need to go.

Do you guys realize how much these small changes have hurt the class as a whole? I do virtually nothing in this game but WvW/PvP/Theorycraft. People are bad. When people learn how to to fight revs they will get dropped like it’s hot because they have no real purpose or identity.

If anything , you should be buffing the class right now, not nerfing it.

Balance
Balance, is always going to be an issue, but here is where you need to listen. For the love of god- STOP BALANCING AROUND METRICS. Metrics cause you to balance around averages, and ‘missed opportunities’. Let me explain something to you. Missed opportunities are subjective to each player. This can mean that the skill is sub-par, or that the character doesn’t want to use it. There is NO WAY to verify which of the two these are. Instead, what ends up happening is that you nerf or buff things unncessesarily. Balance should be done around top player capability. You know why, and I know why. Yes, this means skill ceilings are increased, but it also introduces risk vs reward.

I really didn’t want to talk about classes here, for reasons I’ll explain afterwards, but let’s use the elementalist as an example.
Since post-beta, players have been constantly moaning about how hard the elementalist is; how weak it is compared to other classes. Till this day, people are still complaining about the class. What is the truth here? The truth is, as you said yourself, eles are fine for the most part. What is occuring here partially, is the L2P factor.

This factor unfortunately is thrown around by every average john who thinks they’re good at the class they play. However, as bad as this may sound, most of the complaints about this, and many other classes, are L2P issues. This is why the theorycrafters, are the top players, and the sheep are the bad ones.

You guys have truely done a wonderful job at balancing, and eliminating the “trinity”, but one thing you failed to remember is that players want to play what they imagine. If a player wants a trinity, he/she will find one. This is the sole reason why people who make such claims, make them. This includes traits, and skills. You need to make sure everyone can craft their character how they want. Cantrip utility water builds on ele are still the most viable option, despite your teams effort to make other utilities and options available. Like fresh air, make sure improvements synergize with the outcome.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it is something to consider. You guys need to have a focus group composed of the greatest players of each class that can provide unbiased INPUT to compliment your team’s balance decisions. Balancing at high level play ensures balancing remains constant.

The reason why I didn’t want to talk about specific classes, is because they’re all balanced reasonably well on the whole, but in specific scenarios, certain classes excel. Unfortunately, this means in the players eyes, the game is broken. The players know what classes these are, I know, and you should know. Each class in this game has broken attributes to it, some of which are yet to be explored by the general population, but your job as designer should be to limit potential exploitation.

People WILL EXPLOIT whatever they can. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

There are some really OP things certain builds can do (that fall across ALL classes)that are not yet known to the general public, that a few of the theorycrafters (including myself) keep to ourselves, to save further wrongdoings on balance because of both your decisions, and the community’s outrage, and general bad playing.

Look, we can go on all day regarding balance, but let’s be real here. You get the point. Do yourselves, and us, a favour. On top of this, consider:

- Making the elite slot an OPEN slot, for both utility and elite.
- Adding deathmatch and team deathmatch modes alongside conquest (horrible, and the source of all this imbalance) mode.
- Making kills against players in wvw count towards points. One point per 10 kills. Adding 1 point per 3 kills whilst under the “outnumbered” buff.

Last but not least, Players.

Guys, there is nothing worse, than having to deal with imbeciles on a daily basis. From a company point of view, both internally and externally. The sad truth is, most gamers do not know what they want, but instead cry, and throw out random suggestions based on what they think will be cool.

Can you guys please, keep your outrageous thoughts, and comments to yourself. I do not need to elaborate here. The game is no where where it should be in terms of progression because you clowns are drowning out the legitimate, and truely need information given by skilled and educated players, who are concerned, or are having genuine problems.
P.S – Devs, and you Mr Sharp. The potential is still there to make this game genre changing. Hang in there.
There are so many more topics that I wanted to discuss, but to be frank, you guys have already seen and heard them from the well outspoken players that haven’t given up on your game, or your boards.

What I will say is this. Anet have a long history of hate on balancing the elementalists. They ALWAYS feel they are overpowered even though they are usually the weakest class. It took them six years for kittens sake to finally buff the class in GW1 which only happened earlier this year.

Anet still remains as my favourite developer, but kitten they need to fix the kitten up.

You guys are bored. And to the OP, stop kidding yourself. You clearly have a problem with same sex relationships.

Versepelles.1972:

Razarei.2809:

I logged in to say how awful your “balance” decisions are, and people like you are exactly why people with legitimately good balance ethos’ are ignored.

This this thread pains me to read.

Here’s how to respond to a post you disagree with:

“I think your suggestion X is not great because Y. Perhaps Z would be better.”

For instance, I think that you forgot to actually add anything of substance to the conversation. Perhaps you should try that sometime!

I explained my reasons. It is still far too soon to be making any changes to any class at the moment. People need to get better at playing their classes. I may come across as elitist but I definitely have the skill and recognition in my classes to back it up. Rev is not even close to being one of the top classes or specs at the moment.

Max you can get is 33% So yes, every single one of those traits are beyond useless.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

@ArmageddonAsh.6430:
How do you even “know” that the profession updates are being done by two people who among them know only anything about four of the eight professions?

Even if they are two people (which I doubt), they are two people who have been deeply involved in CREATING all eight professions from a very early stage.

Even if they only play two or three professions each on their private gaming accounts (which I don’t know is the case), this is irrelevant, because these people need to be using game accounts with characters of all professions, while they are at work testing (changes to) skills and traits. And how do you think they test skills and traits? By PLAYING A CHARACTER for some time across all aspects of the game, most likely on a separate alpha testing game server.

And finally, any self-respecting company will not hire employees that are lazy and stupid. If some skill or trait fixes cause bugs, then that is human error, and those bugs will get fixed eventually. I hope sooner rather than later.

So in conclusion, you do not know what you are talking about.

It’s been stated by Jon that they have two people working on balance. Care to take a guess at which classes are their favourite?

Some of you REALLY need to stop and think from their point of view.

ALL they are trying to do is to cater to EVERYONE’s needs, and quite frankly the uproar of the community is appalling. People need to stop caring about what they want and start caring about the game on a whole. I don’t know what the hell happened to this community but it seems all the children/elitists from other games have flocked to GW2 and made it their home.

Newsflash: There are plenty of us who appreciate not having the drama. Nobody cares that you only care for <insert game aspect here> because there is the whole game to be played. Stop pigeon-holing people.

Please explain to me why the answers given are not sufficient enough? They are perfectly sufficient. I’m tired of reading posts where people ‘guess’ or ‘assume’ or interpret things in ways completely different from what’s intended. Can you really blame Chris for being cautious in the way things are worded? This is not a conspiracy, this is not PR stunts, this is a real session.

Give the guy some slack, gosh.

Also: You people need to learn to read.

Cosmic Teapot.9162:

Intigo.1653:

The Churning Earth dodge roll (when it triggers, not like it used to be) should be a Blast Finisher, the rest not.

That way the trait would be fairly well balanced – in its current state it’s near useless and only the Water roll is remotely useful.

It’s quite simple.

I agree.

On another note I also think the water dodge roll is inherently overpowered. Cleansing wave is a 40 second cd and evasive arcana allows it to be used every 12 or so seconds. I think it should get the healing ripple treatment and only scale with healing power by 50%.

Yeah totally let’s nerf the already near-useless stat healing power even more.

/facepalm

Grandmaster trait people. As for blast finishers, they should just be on 10 seconds each attunement like it was stated in the tooltip.

This thread is dead and should be closed.

1) There are a lot of people new to elementalist who do not understand the class
2) There are a lot of elitists who deem themselves awesome but actually aren’t
3) We have ALL established (even those defending, which defeats the purpose) that elementalists are indeed not as easy to play, or easier than other classes, and has no niche, and needs a buff to trait synergy and downed state.
4) ANet are still silent
5) You people with your silly videos vs random newbies trying to prove ele is OP makes me laugh.

TL:DR – Stop arguing, it’s a waste of time. Keep your eyes open for my upcoming tutorial series on how to play an elementalist properly, and none of this “LUK MY VIDEO I GET TOP SCORE ELE IZ FINE” video.

Warning: Other classes will still yield better risk vs rewards.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, elementalist in this game isn’t a typical mage class. It’s your hybrid healer that does mediocre damage. If you spec for damage you’re just going to getkitten that is the bottom line.

We don’t need weapon swap.
We don’t need the attunement idea to change.
We don’t need direct buffs to skills.

What we do need is:
Bug fixes (Essential)

Either better stat scaling for damage (so GC’s would actually be GC’s)
OR
An additional amount of trait points. Why? Because I believe this would solve many of the problems with the elementalists. Because the traits are so lackluster and individual, there is almost no synergy between them. More trait points would allow us to balance this issue.

Conjures:

- Need to be available for the elementalist only
- Need to act as a weapon kit (engineer)
- Need no cast time

Problem solved. Remove that kitteny stat bonus.