Guild Wars 2

AuldWolf, it’s “hard to understand” because you’re describing two wildly different ‘types’ of Atheism.

Imagine a person in the real world who acknowledges the Christian God exists, lives and rules the Kingdom of Heaven in some invisible city in the sky, has incredible otherworldly powers including the ability to create life, but says you shouldn’t worship him. Would you actually call that person an Atheist? Probably not!

That’s how the Charr view gods. They acknowledge everything about them up until the actual worship part – that they reject.

At a certain point we end up at the “walks and talks like a duck” argument. How do you define a God? For many it’s the power they have, how they “lord” over a people or perhaps create life. Gods are clearly different than the rest of living beings. These are all things the Charr acknowledge; they just don’t think a God should be worshipped or have authority despite these qualities.

To use your own analogy, Charr do not say “Grenth doesn’t exist”. They say “Grenth exists, and we should probably kill him”

AoE buff auras are not unique to GW2, and games use a variety of ways to balance them. Some root the buff area in place, some allow the buff-giver in question to be easily squashed, while others put them on long casts and cooldowns.

Paradoxically, Spirits suffer all 3 of these balances and are also seen (in today’s meta) as the weakest AoE buff available.

Removing even 1 of these limitations would go a long way to making them feel useful. In my own opinion I’d remove the frailness and up their effectiveness. Then you’d have a buff bot on a long cool down that can take a punch, and if you specialize in them they become something pretty special by walking around as well.

Just wanted to add my voice to those confused by Mike’s post. You’re seriously saying it would be “ideal” for people and guilds to move servers? That seems absolutely insane

I mean seriously, that’s a solution that literally will only work if people don’t actually follow it. If everyone did that you’d go from Server A having 3 hour wait time and Server B having a 30 minute wait time to both servers have an 1.5 hour wait time. Not much of an improvement.

Ele is not a pet class, but it absolutely suffers the same issues plaguing Necro AI pets. The pause between summoning an elemental and them finally attacking is significant, and given they only last 60 seconds anyway you’re probably going to be summoning them at the start of combat

All the other bugs I’ve noticed fall in line with those outlined here. Anecdotally, a large number of Ele skills just feel “off”. Things such as attacks continuing or targeting outside of your control, skills which pop a cooldown but appear to have no effect, skills that seem to cancel early or late…things of that nature.

What’s most surprising is that I have not seen any issues like that with any other class. The closest comparison, mechanics-wise, is probably the Engi, and none of his skills suffer from broken mechanics like the above.

I’m shocked to see you have that opinion. Ground targeting is far from pointless – indeed, those are some of your most powerful skills as any class.

And to see you rely on racials in PvE…I cannot even fathom a) what race you’re even playing (all racials are pretty bad) or b) what you even mean by that.

I wish I had something better to respond to your post with, but we’re definitely two different people.

From the word “go” I was expecting to roll and main and Engineer. The idea of a support-focused “jack of all trades” wielding guns and bombs in a fantasy world seemed totally in line with every archetype I’d care about.

I made it to 35 before I quit in boredom, and I was left confused and unable to articulate why exactly it wasn’t clicking for me. After shopping around a number of alts I came across the Elementalist – after a number of levels with them, I don’t think that it’s a stretch to call them the offensive-focused version of the engineer (jack of all trades, needing to swap between “modes”, etc.)

I want to avoid turning this into a class war (enough of that in real life), but I did want to talk about 3 areas that the ele and engi share – indeed 3 areas that appear to be the main bread and butter of both classes – where the ele blows the engineer out of the water.

Synergy
Once you learn to properly swap attunements it’s like you’re seeing into the Matrix. Skills feed into each other in two important ways: a) The first 5 skills fit together nicely, but more importantly b) they also fit into other attunements, covering weaknesses and providing clearly defined benefits to each other. It feels entirely natural to Ride the Lighting into a fight, make their day worse with some burning to the face, cripple them and knock them down with Earth, then fly away after switching back to Air.

There is no such battle flow to engineers. Kits don’t cover weaknesses or flow into other skills so much as they are a full on replacement. This can be fine for some playstyles, but the way they’re currently designed makes the switch feeling jarring and clunky. It’s hard to say if the root problem is that there’s no focus or too much focus, but it definitely is noticeable.

The fact that kits outright replace utilities further destroys their synergy. The ele has a plethora of utility skills that change depending on attunement – not so with the engi, where you indeed lose utility skills in order to use a kit.

Swapping modes
When I swap attunements, I can guarantee I’ll have access to a set of 5 skills that make sense and have great utility. All 4 elements have at least one damage, one utility, and one support skill per weapon – In other words, it’s never a disadvantage to swap modes.

With engineer, kits always make me feel I’m losing something. In addition to having to give up a utility slot just for the ability to use it, kits tend to make me miss my weapon skills and the variety and utility they give me. Take bombs – I lose my range and all of my support for the ability to use 5 nearly identical skills that cause different conditions. Grenades are cool if you’re looking for raw damage, but man are they boring in execution.

Weapon kits are better, but not by much. Flamethrower allows me to set stuff on fire…but I lose a lot of utility, I lose my range, and I lose that aforementioned utility slot. What did I gain? I can already set things on fire a few different ways, I can already blow people back.

Tool Kit gives me a melee, but you’d need to spec in a direction entirely different than anything else just to survive, let alone take advantage of this archetype shift. And as before, the skills I gain can already be replicated elsewhere – the pistol/shield can bleed, cripple, confuse, and block attacks, and I can do it at range.

Branching skills
Like the engi, certain ele skills can have a number of varying effects. Unlike the Engi, these effects are under my control and predictable. For example, my heal can grant me a boon of my choice depending on my attunement – compare that to the engi where you’re rolling the dice every time.

I understand it’s in line with the flavor of the class to appear random, but isn’t it more in line to appear random yet actually be entirely in control? Give us more player agency to influence results of our actions and you’ll do a lot to make us feel like we own our own devices.