Guild Wars 2

Ooh, BRILLIANT! Your one experience on the opening day of raids TOTALLY disproves any action that anet has done! Especially when that experience was with other players who most likely haven’t even tried the raid yet, and certainly haven’t beaten it. Please, regale us with even more tales of your tiny sample size and how they utterly disprove literally everything.

Hell, tornado doesn’t even need to reflect, just let it block projectiles. Like Swirling winds is a peaceful looking wind movement and it blocks kitten, what could possibly be more “swirling winds” than a TORNADO?

And yet the “nerfs” didn’t make getting masteries any easier. If OP is in fact “nearly done with everything” then the changes had nothing to do with it. Elite spec only takes 250 HP instead of 400? According to OP, he’s nearly done, which means he’s gotten all 400 hero points in maguuma anyway, so that nerf didn’t affect him. “But the individual hero points were easier because the itzel gas is gone” – OP claims to be nearly done, which means he MUST already have itzel gas mastery.
Face it Aeon, you ran out of content to do because YOU rushed your way through it, and now you’re trying to blame others for changes that don’t effect you. Get off your high horse.

Bear in mind that there are only 400 hero points available in all of maguuma. If they left it at 400, a new character would literally have to map comp all of maguuma (the hero points at least) in order to unlock their elite spec.
You don’t think thats just a BIT excessive?

Any particular reason ya’ll went for a flat % damage reduction instead of giving minions .75 second distortion on evade? Rangers already give protection to pets on evade, coding-wise that sounds easy enough to extend.

I love how people kitten about the ele’s condi cleanse when they don’t actually know the cooldowns involved. Lets tally them up, shall we? On the meta d/d cele ele we have:

Water attune – 1 condi, 10 second cooldown
Water dodge – 1 condi, 10 second cooldown
Water 5 – 1 condi, 40 second cooldown
Cleansing Fire – 4 condi, 32 second cooldown
CF (Trait) – 4 condi, 32 second cooldown
Lightning Flash- 1 condi, 32 second cooldown
Armor of Earth – 1 condi, 60 second cooldown

Seems like a lot, right? A shocking 23 conditions cleared every 60 seconds is broken, right? Except for one problem: With the exception of CF, every condi clear the ele has only clears 1 condition at a time. While some can be optimally used at roughly the same time (dodge→waterswap just before the end), realistically all of those cleanses are happening one at a time, and can be easily beaten by pulsing cover condis like necro wells, ranger shortbow 1 skill or entangle , mesmer’s chaos storm, etcetera. Additionally, this also supposes that the ele is putting 8 skills on cooldown as well as using half of their dodgerolls every 10 seconds to cleanse conditions. The meta bunker-guardian build has similar AoE condition clears and they’re not considered broken.

Ele excels at stopping the conditions from non-condi builds, shrugging off weakness with ease, but any sustained condition pressure from a condition engi, necro or mesmer will easily exhaust all of the ele’s cleanses and then watch as they die an agonizing death to aids.

The sad thing is that flame axe is probably the second best designed conjure behind LH. If its numbers were buffed a bit, it would make an excellent addition to d/x builds for some ranged versatility.
And they need to rework icebow 4 to heal allies instead of damaging enemies. Its supposed to be a support weapon, why it ever had such a crazy damage skill on it is beyond me, but keeping that skill with kitten-tier numbers is just pointless.

I don’t like the idea of the 5 second cast on this conjure glyph. Conjures were originally meant to (Yea, I know, conjures having a purpose? What?) shore up weaknesses in builds. Take flame axe on dagger builds so you have a ranged option. Take LH on staff builds if the enemy gets in your face. Icebow so you can support your group. Earth shield to help you tank for a bit. But they don’t do that because 180 stat points is nothing compared to the 2000 points coming from your gear. They should rework conjures to convert stats. Frostbow converts ferocity into healing power, Earth shield turns Power into Toughness/Vit, etc. That would bring back the original intent and let the conjures be useful again without having to worry about frostbow turning into the best DPS since release FGS.

ANET has a very high bar on what constitutes greifing. As in the Rata Sum maize balm case, to be greifing you have to be actively, intentionally and clearly maliciously trying to cause someone else problems. As long as you can provide some justifiable reason for doing what you’re doing like “I’m farming my shield kills” or “I hate rats”, then you’re in the clear. What got the player in the maize incident banned was that he was given his own instance of rata sum to kill rats in, but he actively tried to get back into the other instance so he could keep greifing. If he had ANY reason to be killing those rats, he would’ve been happier in that ghost instance.

Gee, thanks for the detailed post about whats “wrong” with the heal signet. Seems to be working perfectly to me.
And this is ele we’re talking about, the devs pretend we don’t exist unless 5 ele teams are winning in the pro PvP matches, or one dev gets sore about our PvE damage output. Then they fire the nerf missile and forget all about us.

The whole reason ele vigor was 5/5 instead of 5/10 like other classes is because its a major trait for eles, a minor trait for all others.
Mesmer, minor trait: 5s vigor on crit, 10s icd
Guardian, minor tait: 5s vigor on crit, 10s icd
Ele, MAJOR trait: 5s vigor on crit, 10s icd
Engi, MAJOR traitL 5s vigot in swiftness, 5s icd
Does this seem fair? Instead of trying the trait more to criticals, so that berserker and assassin gear eles get more defensive vigor while celes get less, anet once again took the copout to kitten over any other ele build. Its like the only want d/d to be viable, but they want it to be mediocre at best and are willing to kitten everything else the class has to make that happen. RIP aura signet ele when Fires Embrace was taken. RIP fresh air ele when bolt to the heart had to compete with fresh air. RIP glass staff ele when thieves and mesmers got survivability buffs to help them hunt down the staffies while we got nothing.
But thats ok, I’ll just go do some fractals one my ele, at least my team still wants my icebows…

I always figured the dialogue was kind of a satire, the kids are pointing out that marjory and kasmeer are over sexualised because the only important things about them is that first they’re detectives, and second they make out too much.

And honestly the dialogue is fine, but its on too short of a loop. Hearing the same lines three or four times when you’re reorganizing your bank and clearing bags does get a tad annoying.

Liking most of these changes, a few ideas though:

1. Overloads still just don’t feel right. Why am I overloading my air attunement, which is the damage attunement on both main-hand ele weapons, for more damage? It just turns into a math equation to figure out whether or not to overload on cooldown. Similarly, air doesnt seem to offer much “frontline support” for a frontline support spec. Maybe make the static area pulse short superspeed or shocking aura to allies, slightly dropping the damage or vuln to compensate?
2. The new rebound sounds FANTASTIC for a frontline ele build. Pop that as your hammer train jumps in if you’re worried about certain people (or yourself) getting onepushed. I AM a little worried about the base healing though- As I’m reading it, it means you’ll block the killing blow, and then heal 2k from there? So you’ll have ~3 or 4k health after? Or do you mean it brings you to post-rally health of 50% and then 2k heal from there? The latter would be great, the former usually just results in you dying again.
3. The new stab seems to be in a good place, but how are we supposed to keep up with the hammer train with warhorn? Blinds from dust storm arent useful on the move, we still dont have any blocks or invulns from warhorn, and our only real gapcloser would be burning speed at this rate, I’m worried that the tempests will get left behind during the first push.
4. The 10% damage buff on harmonious conduit just isn’t a good idea. A short term damage buff like that is fine for warriors’ low cooldown burst skill, or for mesmers’ mantra spam, but doesnt make much sense for tempest overloads where you would have at BEST 50% uptime if you were overloading as fast as you could. Furthermore, a 10% personal dps buff just doesnt feel very support or frontline oriented. Maybe change it to a teamwide 10% dps buff for 5 seconds or change it to something that feels more personally impactful.
5. Regarding EP, you could just make it a trait buff like spotter, to give 10% reduced damage and stack multiplicatively with protection’s normal 33% (work the math out so it still gives the old 40%). Most of ele’s protection applications are 3-4 seconds, so I don’t think you need to worry about scaling the duration, though I may be wrong.
   #It doesn’t look like you hit on the shouts themselves- are we still on board with fixing “Wash the cringe away”’s name? And Eye of the Storm still needs a look at regarding its cooldown duration vs effects.
6. Last, while we’re having all these conversations on risk/reward of overloads, remember that a lot of this discussion can and should be applied to Churning Earth. That skill is only ever used as a blast finisher for pre-fight might stacking, its a net DPS loss to channel in a fight and easily dodgerolled or interrupted, and its cast time + aftercast is now actually LONGER than the overloads’ cast times.

Nah, “Aftershock” is much less cringy and silly than “shock and aftershock”. Now if only they’de fix the heal…

Karl McLain.5604:

Hi all!
Thanks for your continued feedback on the Tempest. If possible, let’s compile all feedback into this thread.
We’re iterating in quite a few areas for this specialization, including Rebound. Here’s the description of the latest implementation we’ve been testing over the last few days:
“Shout and infuse your allies with arcane energy. Allies who would take lethal damage while this is active ignore the deathblow and are healed instead. If the effect expires naturally, grant an aura based on your current attunement.”
-Karl

Now THAT actually sounds like a decent elite. A party wide AED could be useful in pvp, wvw, maybe even pve (but only baddies take fatal damage, right?

The overloads still dont feel right. Air is no longer a DPS loss (but not much of a gain) and water is a decent heal, but they’re only breaking even if they finish casting. Its like the current problem with churning earth- why should I make myself a target for a 4 second channel if the payoff on a successful channel doesnt significantly exceed the payoff for autoattacking 6 or 8 times? Maybe if Unstable conduit granted us auras while channeling the overload instead of finishing them, then earth would be a better engage tool, water would be more effective definsively, and fire and air would better discourage your enemy from just meleeing your face in while you channel the attunement, because right now they still dont do enough damage to make your enemy back off. Oh, and hardy conduit needs to last the duration of the overload at least. it says I’m supposed to have protection while overloading, but here I am at the 4 second mark on fire and I have no protection.

anet doesn’t care
Devs dont ele
the traits suck

Mainhand skills (lightning whip, burning speed, etc) are based on your mainhand weapon strength.
Offhand skills (comet, firegrab, etc) are based on your offhand weapon strength. Thats why its so common to never bother with an ascended focus for ele- only 3 of our focus skills do damage (and the damage is secondary to the utility of those skills) so its often better to just have multiple exotic foci with slaying sigils, energy and the like.

No, its been 1200 ever since the nerf from 1500 two years ago

The thing with this game is that zerker is and always will be (unless condis get buffed even more) the best stat combo. While staff has less defensive options than focus, you can still kite mobs easily using water 4, earth 4 and 4, and air 3 and 5. Against trash mobs, just LoS them around a corner, pop glyph of storms in earth, then spam lava font until everything is dead. Staff is viable for soloing, I can solo arah with it (though prefer to use d/f for more dps and survivability)

I’m hoping HoT will bring us more cantrips, because anet has already shown us that they want every other type of utility to be trash tier.

Uhhh guys? The protection on aura trait is only 3 seconds. Just sayin.
and if anet REALLY had a problem with it, they’de just give it an icd instead ofkilling Fire’s Embrace.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. I think they just figured conjurer was overloaded and then forgot to find a new home for FE.

Lets see, melee range (obviously), something thats significantly different from the current dagger mainhand playstyle, and “tempest” themed. I’m going to guess by that theme they mean hard-to-catch, like the wind, and unrelenting, like a storm. Therefor, I’m going to guess it’ll have significant amounts of evade (akin to s/d thief) and large amounts of condition pressure (because dagger mainhand is already an adequately balanced power-based melee weapon)

Of course, this IS elementalist we’re talking about, so I think whats REALLY going to happen is that we’ll have to go into battle with NO mainhand weapon, and we’ll have a conjurable one-handed sword. Its 1 skill will immobilize ourselves and apply poison to ourselves. The 2 skill will give us fury, might and 25 stacks of bleeding. The 3 skill is called “kitten suit” and turns us into an ooze for 15 seconds. Because thats how anet likes to balance eles.

Azel.4786:

It was a (sic because it keeps changing to kitten if I leave the “an”) useful trait …

Just wanted to chime in grammar wise for OP that “a useful trait…” is correct (as opposed to an) because useful is pronounced like “YOUsfull” with a hard consonant ‘y’ sound.

But I totally agree that anet considers eles as an afterthough and that they should have made lingering elements baseline, nerfing soothing mist’s duration to compensate if necessary.

Signet ele was set to be one of the best ele builds, taking Fire, Earth and then either Air (selfish) or Water (team oriented) to have 100% fire aura uptime, craze signet spam, boons and conditions galore… and then anet managed to completely and utterly kill the build by taking the “fire aura on signet use” out of the conjurer trait.
RIP signet ele, you were almost a thing.

FE was core to pvp signet ele, RIP T.T

Yep, got kicked from my Arah P2 duo today, I was showing a new guy in my guild how to solo, talking about how great it was, how challenging it is to solo a dungeon, how much money you get, he was like “yea, this is pretty cool”. Then when we got to the end, two guys show up, ask who to send the money to… and then kick us. Second time I’ve had my dungeon instance stolen. Anet really needs to fix kicking. Can’t we just prevent people who JUST JOINED the party from kicking? is that so difficult? Hell, I’ll write the code anet, just give me an internship.