Guild Wars 2

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The concepts behind overloading an element were pretty well received

This is how we know tempest is doomed. Rather than admit the fact that they made any sort of mistake, Anet has decided to pretend that everything is just fine and that adding damage will make this spec useful.

I’m honestly fine with you guys not pushing the updates to Tempest right away, so long as you’re focusing on a complete overhaul of the way it works. Tempest and Chronomancer were pretty fun and didn’t looks like they needed to be redone in the way that Tempest does.

I really hope there are some dramatic changes to this elite specialization when it gets updated.

Shouts
I don’t care how good these are mechanically, I can’t bare yelling this cheesy crap. “Wash the pain away!” “Feel the burn!” Seriously, they may as well rename this specialization to Yoga Instructor. Jokes aside, they really need to remove all the annoying yelling from these skills.

Right now, elementalists exclusively use cantrips. The reason for that is that we have the lowest base health and lowest base armor of any class, meaning that we are trying to take as much selfish survivability as we can. Why do you think everyone takes Arcana and Water?

Wash the Pain Away!: Throw an aura onto this. Maybe a light aura? Just as long as it triggers the aura traits it could be useful.
Feel the burn!: This trait seems kind of weak in the damage department. Maybe change it to two stacks?
Eye of the Storm!: Seems like a niche ability. They should add a shocking aura to it to make it align with the rest of the shout utilities.
Shock and Aftershock!: We don’t need this offensive utility. The cooldown is wayyy too long for the effect it provides anyway. I’d rather see an instant cast shout with a 3 second cooldown that grants 3 seconds of stability. This could go a long way in helping teammates secure safe stomps. It might also help during a push in wvw, if there are enough stacks of stability. Idk much about zerg warfare, though.
Flash Freeze!: This trait overall seemed pretty boring. I’d honestly rather see this replaced with wash the pain away as a utility skill. That might be a bit overpowered in the healing department though.
Rebound. First of all, why does this skill get a period when all the other shouts have exclamation points? I guess it just shows that not even Anet is excited about it. I’d much rather see a skill that reduces the cooldowns of all skills by 5 seconds. I don’t even want it to be AoE. It’s just that having a way to reduce our cooldowns every once in awhile might make it worth casting an overload or two on occasion.

Final Thoughts
In order to make the tempest work, we need to see some serious fixes to mechanics that are already in place. Almost all of our autoattacks are terrible, making it a pain to sit in an attunement long enough to reach elemental singularity. There are also tons of other mediocre skills on our weapons like Focus 4 and 5 in fire attunement and about half the skills on scepter. Also, there’s very little consolidation in our aura traits. Fixing powerful auras and merging elemental shielding into Earthen proxy might alleviate that.

I really hope Anet devs start responding to posts in the elementalist forum because playing a supportive auramancer build looks like a lot of fun, but right now it’s just mediocre.

Minor traits
The current minor traits are pretty terrible when compared against other lines. They should all be combined together into one minor trait that gives us overloads with protection and swiftness. I’m not entirely sure what they should do with the other two minor traits, though. Anet stated that they wanted the tempest to be a supportive class as well as a frontliner, so maybe make the increased protection strength into a minor trait? Another possibility would be something like the altruistic healing trait on guardians. Elementalists don’t give out as many boons as guardians, though, so idk how strong that would be. It might even end up being over powered. Hopefully you guys have better ideas for new minors than me.

Major Traits
Gale Song: Seems cool. I’m fine with it as it is. Although considering the fact that the other shouts all give auras, it seems weird that Eye of the storm doesn’t give you a shocking aura.
Latent Stamina: You’re giving us a mechanic that increases the cooldown on our attunement, and then punishing us for using that mechanic? This trait should just give us vigor on every attunement swap, with a 10 second cooldown. The amount of vigor should be increased so that this trait isn’t just plain worse than renewing stamina.
Unstable Conduit: We should get the aura at the start rather than at the end. Having a shocking aura would make it more plausible for me to actually finish casting the air attunement. Besides, even if we cancel the cast to keep the aura, we’re still on a 20 second cooldown for the whole attunement.

Earthen Proxy: This should really just be a minor trait. If Anet is determined to keep this a major trait, they should add something like 20% protection duration to it, or just combine it with the elemental shielding trait from Earth, since no one really uses the earth line anyway.
Harmonious Conduit: Overloads are already pretty terrible so I don’t feel incentivized to cast them in the first place. Can’t say how useful this will be until overloads get an overhaul.
Tempestuous Aria: This just seems weaker than earthen proxy. Maybe if it had longer weakness and reduced shout cooldowns it would be worth taking?

Elemental Bastion: This seems like the only reason to take the tempest line right now. I keep trying to make auramancer builds but the problem is that the aura traits are just so spread out that it’s impossible to get something that even comes close to the standard d/d cele build. I think Anet needs to fix the Powerful Auras trait in water so that you share auras you get by using combo fields. The only auras that shouldn’t be shared are ones that other eles give us with their own aura sharing trait. They should also make it so that all auras stack in duration, instead of just frost aura.
Imbued Melodies: This trait could be good so long as it only goes on cooldown when you actually break a stun, rather than every time you cast a warhorn skill.
Lucid Singularity: Again, overloads aren’t really worth casting right now, but it could be useful as an “Oh, crap!” skill. Still, I’d rather just use Elemental Bastion to stay out of trouble in the first place.

I’m going to explain everything I think is wrong with the tempest specialization and give some suggestions on how I think it could be improved to be competitive with other ele builds in pvp. I chose the pvp perspective because tempest lacks damage modifiers, meaning it’s pretty suboptimal in pve. I’m not going to be looking at the warhorn weapon since that’s a topic for a whole other thread. Feel free to correct me if anything I say is wrong.

Overloads
The entire premise of overloading is that sometimes it should be better to stick with one attunement rather than rotate through them like elementalists currently do. However, the reason elementalists have always rotated is that sticking in one attunement long enough to start autoattacking is almost always a loss of dps, healing, and other utility. If Anet wants to make overloading viable, we need to get autoattacks that aren’t garbage. Seriously, I was trying to make a build that didn’t use water or arcana, and I thought it would be a good idea to try and heal myself with the water overload. However, sitting in water for 5 seconds it so brutal that I gave up on that concept completely.

This brings me to my second point. Reduce the 5 seconds of sitting in your attunement required to cast overloads. Up until now, there has been no reason to sit in water or earth attunement for longer than 3 seconds. If I’m sacrificing arcana to take the tempest line then that’s another second I won’t need to be in water or earth. We’re already sacrificing a lot by locking ourselves out of attunements for an entire 20 seconds. Don’t add even more unnecessary waiting to overloads.

Finally, it seems pretty clear to me that Overload radiuses are way too small. This is the sort of problem that arises when you’re testing out new mechanics against immobile golems rather than actual players. One of the greatest strengths of d/d ele imo is that we have slightly better than melee range. We can deal loads of damage to our enemies while staying just out of the range at which they can hit us back. Overloads work against this fact by forcing us to stand directly on top of the enemy that we’re fighting. If overloads like fire and air had somewhat higher radiuses, we’d be able to damage opponents without there being a guarantee of us getting stunned out of it.

Ele is the class with the lowest base health and lowest base armor. It should have been obvious to Anet that almost every trait and utility choice ele’s make is to make up for that. That’s why we take water, arcana, and cantrips pretty much all the time.

But instead of offering us alternative ways to stay alive, we end up with shouts.

I, personally, would have been much happier with them fixing the weapon skills that have been garbage since launch rather than trying to throw another weapon into the mix. Focus has such amazing skills in earth and air, but GOD those kittenty fire skills? Come on…

And the elite shout? Wow, we get to help warriors rampage 25% more often. This is going to make ele so fun…

If choosing to specialize in Arcane is going to give elementalists an 8.5 second cooldown on attunement swap, is the cooldown of EA also going to get reduced to 8.5 seconds? I know it would be really frustrating if we swapped into water and expected to get a water heal, but instead got nothing.

Even if the cooldown isn’t reduced, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem since people don’t usually use their EA dodge right before swapping out of an attunement, but I just want some clarification.

Nades are trash underwater now. As a condi engineer, I have no idea how to damage targets underwater. Best I can come up with is elixir gun autoattack.

Silinsar.6298:

RyanThomas.4182:

What gear do you use in WvW? Is it just full berserker? Or do you have some cavalier/valkyrie in there too?

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vcAQFAUlUUpkr1UxdLseRiM6BpJabWIFS49BqQe9pAdB-zEyAYLAKEQCsIasVyioxqXwUuLqW/C4NwIFwSKjA-w

Thanks

What gear do you use in WvW? Is it just full berserker? Or do you have some cavalier/valkyrie in there too?

What do you mean by big reward? Back when the event was bugged and counters on server main maps didn’t reset, Blackgate got the citizens saved to well over 2000. Once the miasma maxed, I got a chest with 25 bags of alliance supplies. While that is more than I was getting at lower levels, it certainly isn’t that much. Am I missing something? Is there another big reward past 1500 citizens saved?

Anyone getting any use out of Diamond Skin in sPvP? Or any of the other new traits? The cleansing fire auto-proc trait seemed pretty cool up until I realized it was in master and there aren’t any good 10 point traits in Fire.

Moving Evasive Arcana to master seems a little overpowered. It’s such an amazing trait. I’d take it even just for the water dodge.

A better idea would be to come up with equally good traits and put them into the other traitlines, but of course that would involve ingenuity and innovation on Anet’s part. That’s what Anet seems to be trying to do with Diamond Skin and Fresh Air.

While I’d love to see EA in Master, it’s probably not going to happen because of how op that would be. Sorry =/

The problem with this idea is that we’d end up with some of the coolest items in the game being released through the gemstore. I have no doubt in my mind that players could come up with much cooler weapons than anything around now.

Maybe the number one winner in player votes could be added through some special means of acquisition, like a fancy crafting recipe? I’ve always had more connection with weapons I crafted since there’s a progression to getting them rather than buying them all at once. But maybe that’s just me.

Of course, if Anet does end up doing something like this, it will probably end up in the stupid RNG chests…

I think I may end up waiting for people to farm 47 or whatever high level one is easiest just so I can get my rank up without having to deal with the frustrating ones.

Ok we suspected it was the mistlock glitching. Good to know we’ll never have to deal with this again

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

It’s true that certain professions have an easier time simply dealing with soaking up damage with larger HP pools, but it’s arguable that this is clearly better than the damage avoidance or support mechanics of others. Regardless, adding enemies with endlessly increasing damage output and health isn’t really a very interesting way to add difficulty. That’s why we reduced the HP/Damage scaling in Fractals somewhat and started replacing it with the Mistlock Instabilities that you’ll find starting at level 31.

Molten Berserker one-shots the entire party at level 33. Molten Firestorm oneshots as well. Do you know what reducing damage scaling means? I’ll tell you that it doesn’t mean creating a party wide oneshot mechanic. There are ways of making content difficult without making our toughness and vitality worthless.

The molten berserker can oneshot the entire party, including players with over 3k armor. I’m playing at level 33, with the Outflanked debuff. Is the outflanked debuff bugged?

I’m not opposed to the character so much as the fact that she popped up out of nowhere, and she’s ridiculously overpowered. I mean come on, graduated ALL of the asura colleges? That’s a bs backstory if I ever saw one.

I also don’t like how she’s behind EVERYTHING. There is literally no mystery to any of the living story. From the moment we hear it announced, we know who’s behind it, and exactly how it will end.

We’ll foil Scarlet’s evil plot, Scarlet will laugh and say she doesn’t care and that nothing we do matters because the devs can come up with another excuse plot for her, and then she’ll disappear for a bit.

I was the only one who got pulled, so I think it was a pretty rare glitch. But I DEFINITELY got yanked off the platform, rather than the floor disappearing beneath my like the platforms are supposed to.

In the boss fight of the story mode against the thaumanova anomaly it’s possible for the portals on the floor below to pull you, thereby instakilling you with fall damage. There’s no way to see or stop this, other than getting lucky and not passing over a portal. Please fix this.

I’m aware that there are already guilds dedicated to doing high level fractals. I’m just wondering how I can get invited to such a guild. After mistlock abilities get put in and we all get knocked down to 30, I’d like to be in a fractal guild so that I don’t have to deal with pugs as often. I’m not saying pugs are bag players, I’d just like to have guaranteed voip.

How can I get invited to that guild? Who should I message?

My main issue with the chambers is that the fights occur in boring open rooms. I play an elementalist, mostly dagger/dagger, and in order to be effective, I need to use terrain to help me group up enemies and spray them with AoE. Some walls or rocks or something would also be great for defending myself from all the arrows/bullets flying around, not to mention that annoying Brawler who just spams his jump interrupt attack. Without cover, what am I supposed to do? I can’t dodge forever.

I ended up switching to scepter focus and keeping far away from the enemies, but I wouldn’t have had to do this if there were any sort of cover in the room. It’s like you’re saying play heavy armor or play ranged.

And don’t tell me to pull them into the corridor. That would be stupid because of the protector’s field of invulnerability.

Right now I see a lot of solo players complaining that solo players have to either run away from everything or join up with a zerg in order to make it through the tower. Those who try to fight their way through are frustrated by how often other players pull mobs onto them. So why isn’t there an option for us to enter the tower, or at least enter individual floors, on our own/ with our party? Giving an OPTION for an instanced version would satisfy both the solo players and the ones who just wanted to zerg.

I doubt it would be too intense on Anet’s servers to create instanced versions of levels of the towers, since dungeons have worked fine since launch.

I play a dagger dagger elementalist on the Blackgate server and was able to make it through the tower solo, except for the parts where you have to fight a champion to make it to the next room.

I didn’t think it was very difficult, and I didn’t die after I figured out what the spore bombs were (hehe that was fun). However, I also didn’t fight ANYTHING. After trying to take on the first couple vets, I realized that hallucinations spawn faster than I can deal with them, enemies rez each other, and hallucinations will stunlock me into the ground if I actually try to stomp someone.

I actually had a lot of fun kiting groups of enemies through the maze parts on the third level and then ambushing them with AoE, darting away right afterwards. However, the enemies I killed would respawn before I could finish off the whole group.

The thing about this dungeon is that if you want to play solo, you aren’t going to be able to fight anything. At least not if you’re on a big server like Blackgate. I still had fun careening past mobs, but I can see why it would get boring after the first couple of runs.

After all, we’re supposed to be INVADING the tower, right? That actually implies fighting.

The problem with joining an ele theorycrafting guild is that I wouldn’t be able to see the discussion in guild chat unless I was repping, which I probably won’t be because I always rep my main guild.

Would you ele discussions take place on a website forum?

Wanderer.3248:

GS ranger can solo most stuff, but there’s always some idiot that runs through with four extra vets chasing them and suddenly you’ve chain stunned with five stacks of confusion bleeding and torment and it’s a repair bill plus 5 silver to get back.

I think you mean some hapless solo player trying to make it through the tower alive. That is what this thread is about, after all. Let’s show some empathy, here.

Besides, situational awareness is your responsibility. If you’re running around by yourself, you can’t blame particle effects for blinding you to the incoming mobs. You have to be ready to escape at a moments notice. Even if it weren’t for some other player pulling mobs to you, a wandering patrol might happen upon you during one of your fights.

What I’m saying is, if you’re going to play solo, it comes down to you to watch out for other people, and to be ready to escape when things get too hot.

Hermes.7014:

I thought it was just my impression but I have the feeling that everything inside the tower is stronger than usual. Veterans seem more like normal Elites, and Elites near the power of regular Champions and Champions are almost as tough as Legendary.

I think the mobs might feel stronger in the tower because of the hallucination gas. Since it’s giving you constant DoT, not to mention summoning illusions to fight you, it’s going to make enemies feel stronger, when really it’s just added pressure from the tower’s special mechanic.

But who knows, maybe the mobs in the tower really are all buffed.

Ashley Segovia.8276:

Hi there Palm Tiger (and anyone else experiencing this issue):

The instructions below will change the way Guild Wars 2 connects on your network. In short, this will force all inbound and outbound data to use port 80. Since port 80 is a very common port, it usually has the least amount of issues with transmission of data. To do this:

1. Locate the file “GW2.exe” and right-click it, selecting “Create Shortcut.”
2. Rename this shortcut to “Guild Wars 2 Port Test.”
3. Right-click on this shortcut and select “Properties.”

4. Edit the “Target” line to include /clientport 80 at the end. Note: Please make sure /clientport 80 is outside of the quotes.
• Correctly Formatted Example: “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\GW2.exe” /clientport 80
• Incorrectly Formatted Example: “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\GW2.exe /clientport 80”

5. Once completed, click “Ok” to save your changes.

If you get an error trying to save, your target line may not have the correct format. Please try Step 4 again.

6. Double click “Guild Wars 2 Port Test” and try connecting again.

Hope this helps!

I was having the same problem, and changing the target fixed it for me. Thanks!

Fox.3562:

Over 3,000 hours on my Mesmer, 95% of which is from WvW. Mesmer’s are a pretty weak class in groups, so here’s a few changes I think would benefit the class in group play.

Mind Stab Blast Finisher

• Mind Stab (Greatsword 3) should be a blast finisher. Mesmers right now have only one blast finisher (Torch 4) and it’s unreliable because of the 3 second delay from stealth. Mind Stab being a blast finisher would give Mesmers the ability to contribute to groups by blasting static/fire/water/etc fields.

Unblockable Null Field

• Null Field (Utility) should be unblockable. Not sure if this is a bug or intended, but right now classes can walk right through null field as long as they have a block (warrior shield, guardian heal, etc) and have none of their boons stripped. It can also be evaded/dodge rolled through. Necro wells are unblockable, so why not Null Field?

Imbued Diversion to Master Tier

• Imbued Diversion should not be a Grandmaster trait. There’s no reason why a Mesmer should ever waste 30 trait points for a 5 target daze on a 31 second cooldown, especially with something as strong as Illusionary Persona as an alternative. Counter Blade (Sword 4) is a 5 target daze on a 15s (untraited) cooldown, Into the Void (Focus 4) is a 5 target interrupt on a 25s (untraited) cooldown, and Illusionary Wave (Greatsword 5) is a 5 target interrupt on a 30s cooldown. Moving it down to Master tier would make it a desirable option for a Glamour build.

Retaliatory Demise and Chaotic Revival

• Retaliatory Demise (Chaos VI) and Chaotic Revival (Chaos I) are two traits that I imagine have never been used by anyone and should probably be replaced entirely. There’s not much point in traiting in anticipation of yourself going down, and especially with such lackluster effects.

Phantasm Invulnerability

• Power Mesmers are fairly useless in group battles because most of their damage comes from Phantasms. An interesting suggestion I heard was giving Phantasms invulnerability for long enough for them to do one attack. This would allow a Mesmer to summon a Phantasmal Berserker in a group of enemies without it instantly dying to AoE. This would do comparable damage to a power-wells necro to a group of enemies on a similar cooldown, as the phantasm will likely die as soon as its invulnerability drops.

Mantra AoE Increase

• The AoE effects from Mantras (Stability and condition cleanse) needs to affect a larger area to be of any use in a group battle. Mesmers should typically be near the back of an engagement, and the 240 range is not enough to affect your allies in most situations. I think it should be increased to 600 like Shattered Conditions.

Blinding Befuddlement ICD

• The ICD on Blinding Befuddlement (Illusions IX) should be removed. Mesmers have no spammable blind now that Chaos Armor can only activate once per second. It was only powerful pre-confusion nerf because a Mesmer could keep very high Chaos Armor uptime, and an enemy had a 2/3 chance of applying confusion to himself on EVERY hit. It’s unnecessary now that confusion does half the damage it used to and Chaos Armor has a 1s ICD. All the cooldown does is hurt Glamour Mesmers, who can only apply AoE Blind once every 32 seconds anyway.

I’ve played very little mesmer, though I’ve fought plenty of them in WvW. I’d have to say that I agree with all of your changes. They make sense and the reason I never played mesmer is that they don’t seem to do well against large groups of enemies, or in group fights. The utility always seemed cool, though.

J Wall.1703:

First, Anet, I know lots of people have said it, but I want to echo their point: thanks a ton for starting this dialogue. It shows that you really value player input, and opening yourselves up to this volume of potentially critical response is a very brave and respectable move.

The only comment I have is one a few others have made: the change to symbol of swiftness might not be as helpful as you intended it to be. I understand wanting to beef up the boons on subsequent pulses, but I’m not sure it’ll really help in the end. With all the other symbols, I think you’re right on with the pulsing scheme, because the point of those symbols is to strengthen the guardian and his party where they stand, providing retaliation, protection, or regeneration so they can stay on that spot and fight. Symbol of swiftness doesn’t really serve the same primary function, though; someone else said it, and they’re right, it’s not very swift to stand in one place and gain your maximum swiftness duration.

That’s just my two cents as someone who plays a support guardian and likes not falling behind the zerg.

In any case, thanks for all your hard work. I can’t imagine how many engaging and crazy office conversations must predicate changes like these—I’m sure it’s fun!

Yeah, I know they’re never going to give heavy armor classes lower movement speed, but maybe give light armor classes better mobility skills? Like maybe bring Ride the Lightning back down to 20 seconds, or at least giving us SOMETHING to compete with warriors’ GS3 + GS5 + Sword2.

Thieves have some decent stuff, but mesmers and necros sure are slow.

Since this is a balance patch, I had one other question that I’ve been wondering for a long time. What’s the point of heavy, medium, and light armor? And why do different classes get different health pools?

Okay, so warrior simply starts out with the highest armor AND highest health pool, while elementalist starts out with lowest armor AND lowest health pool.

Where’s the balance? Normally, heavy armor would make you move more slowly (because it’s HEAVY) but heavy armor classes clearly don’t have any sort of speed disadvantage. Light armor classes also aren’t better at dodging attacks. They don’t regenerate endurance at a higher rate. So what, ele’s just get worse stats by default? How is that balanced?

I disagree with the idea that certain classes should get to wear heavy armor without suffering any sort of penalty to movement speed or endurance regeneration. It doesn’t make sense for practical reasons, and it just seems plainly unbalanced.

Ele – The changes made to attunement cooldown in the arcana tree don’t seem to matter at all. People who went 30 into arcana before will still go into arcana after, because having those low cooldowns is so important. Also, Evasive Arcana is one of the best traits we have, especially for the heal in water.

Now I know developers reading this must be thinking that the solution is to nerf ele even further, but this is not the answer. Make the cooldowns 10 seconds by default and change the boost for each point of arcana into something else. Maybe make it affect skill cooldown? I’m not sure.

Right now my ability to use skills in any attunement is hindered by the long swap cooldowns eles get stuck with. Why is our swap cooldown so long? You might argue that it’s because we have 20 weapon skills rather than 10, but look at necromancers. They have a death shroud which gives them access to 4 new skills, as well as a new health bar, which is at least as good as another attunement in and of itself. And yet both weapon swapping and death shroud are on independent 10 second cooldowns.

Now I’m not saying necromancer is a perfect class, but I do think that if Arenanet were to default attunement swaps to 10 seconds and change the arcana bonuses entirely, it would be far more feasible to create diverse new builds on the elementalist.

One more thing… why are both the V and VI skills in arcana being moved to master level? You know every d/d ele that goes 30 into arcana is taking V and VI, so why are you forcing us to pick one? Now there isn’t a single trait in the master level which is of use to D/D eles. And don’t tell me about that dagger movement speed skill, because it doesn’t stack with swiftness, so who cares?

Shadow Trap is a stunbreaker. So why can’t we use it while we’re stunned?

-_- Anet…

Right now, there’s the title “Golden” for people who’ve had over 200 gold at once. 200 gold, however, isn’t all that much. Look at how much legendaries and certain unique weapons cost, like Aether and Infinite Light. They’re worth way over 200 gold! Because of this, I think there should be new tiers after “Golden” that grant progressively better titles. Maybe not tiers, since different tiers can’t currently award different titles. Instead, add achievements under the same category as golden for having progressively higher amounts of gold, like 500, then 1000, then 2000, and so forth (no, I don’t have anywhere close to 2000 gold, but I can dream, right?)

Players feel free to suggest ideas for new titles below!

oops I didn’t notice someone posted the same thing. Sorry.

Look at the prices on these gathering tools with gold to gems conversion. When I last checked, it costed 40 gold to get 800 gems. Shouldn’t the tools be account bound then, since they’re such a huge investment. The unlimited salvage kit was accountbound, since the character had to equip it. It only seems fair that the gathering tools be account bound, too.

I was kinda hoping for a sale on bag slots, since I want some new bag slots on my thief alt, and the price has doubled since I bought them for my main.

While Scarlet’s connection to the Aetherblades has been supported by the story so far (i.e. Mai Trin mentioning her) but the fact that she commands the Molten Alliance forces hasn’t been explained as far as I can tell. Am I missing something? If anyone knows what the connection is, please explain it.

Why didn’t they give us this backstory before introducing the character Scarlet? After all, Mai Trin mentioned Scarlett, so putting this right before the Queen’s Jubilee or the day after Queen’s Jubilee went live would give a bit of context so that Scarlet didn’t seem like some sloppily created cliche villian Anet pulled out of nowhere.

Please, Anet, if you care about lore, try to connect things as you write them, and not tie them together sloppily as an afterthought.

Also, nothing in the story mentioned how Scarlet’s connected to the Molten Alliance.

The fact that we can be immobilized is fine. Every class can be immobilized while invulnerable. But being able to be stunned and feared? How is invulnerability suddenly worse than stability?

Also, do other classes still take condition damage while invulnerable?

I’m talking about dagger attacks specifically because the other weapons are ranged and should be slightly weaker, so it’s more difficult to compare. But yeah, thief shortbow autoattacks are wayyyy stronger than ele scepter or staff attacks, though scepter is so bursty and reliant on skills for it’s burst that it’s more difficult to compare.

Think about Elementalist dagger autoattacks in air attunement. They’re straight damage melee attacks. Now compare them to warrior, ranger, or guardian autoattacks with weapons like sword, axe, and greatsword. Even though elementalists have both the lowest armor and lowest healthpool in the game, forcing us to take a greater risk in order to attack in melee, our damage doesn’t even come close to what warrior, ranger, and guardian can do.

Why doesn’t Anet buff the damage we do at melee range? Our melee attacks are being treated like they’re ranged.

And yes, I know we’re supposed to be using all our skills and swapping around and stuff, but the only way we can come close to the dps of other classes is with lightning hammer, and that’s a utility skill. If it was a kit, like engineers have, I wouldn’t mind so much.

I don’t know why you guys are having so much trouble beating this fight with ele. After failing twice with my thief, I tried using my ele, because of the better survivability. I just used 0|10|10|20|30 with
-Aura skill in Air
-Sharpened Stones in Earth
-Cleansing Wave and Regen on cantrips
-Arcane Attunement bonuses, Vigor on crits, and Evasive Arcana
I used a combo of knights and zerker gear with boon duration runes, and celestial and cavalier trinkets.

Then I just played normally, avoiding the enemy aoe attacks, and spraying AoE of my own. Then the fight was pretty easy.

Hey, I got one of these, but I’m not sure where it came from. It is a possible reward from a black lion chest? I just got my 5000 achievement point chest, so it could have been from that.

Instant kill isn’t so bad if the players know when to expect it, and if there aren’t ridiculous consequences for dying too often. If it weren’t for armor repairs, ticket costs, and waiting for someone to rez me, I wouldn’t mind dying as much.

Let me start this by saying that the Gauntlet is my favorite content addition to the game since launch. I’m glad that there’s some difficult content for solo players now. However, I do have some issues with Queens Gauntlet, many of which make the game type punishing rather than challenging, and others which are annoyances Anet should avoid when they do something like this again. I think the problems with Queen’s Gauntlet could be solved by doing few things:

-Easy access to the gauntlet rather than waypointing followed by a 2 minute hike. I don’t want to wait around in hopes of someone coming to my rescue. Seriously, why was there no waypoint on the upper part of the Crown Pavilion in the first place?

-No armor damage from dying against the gauntlet. Give us something similar to the outmanned mechanic in WvW.

-No requirement of 1 ticket just to fight in a round. The gambits should still require tickets, as that’s risk/reward.

-Put the gauntlet in a separate area from the crown pavilion. Let the people who want to farm and the people who want a challenge do their own separate things. I don’t want garbage framerates in my gauntlet fights just because the zerg below me is nuking a boss to hell. Oftentimes I spawn in the arena, but objects aren’t loading, so when I can finally see my character, I’m downed.

-Remove the glass around the gauntlet arenas, and replace them with invisible walls, like the ones around the ring you stand on while queued for the gauntlet. Glass walls force my camera to zoom in much closer than I would like, and if there were just invisible walls, I’d have better visibility, and the spectators would have a better view of the fight. It’s a win-win.

-If you’re going to have mechanics like permanent revealed, there should also be mechanics which harm other classes. Thieves have the lowest healthpool in the game, along with Elementalist and Guardian. Eles and Guardians have great heals, along with invulnerabilities and blocks. Thieves have only their heal skill, and very limited condition removal without stealth. On fights like the Pirate Crew, I had to switch to my elementalist, and against deadeye, I had to go full burst. If you’re going to take away revealed, give thief access to more heals and condition removals, and things like blocks and invulnerability. Also, come up with mechanics that force other classes to change their build. Take away necromancer’s death shroud in certain fights for instance. That’s their special class mechanic, like Thieve’s stealth. And yes, I know other classes get stealth, but no one depends on it as much for their survivability.

This is all I can think of right now, so other players please submit your thoughts too.

You might also want to look at the Attunement Swap podcast from SOAC Gaming

daphoenix555 is one
BitCloud is another, though his youtube channel is Jetstorm TV