(edited by Tyrel.2043)
Showing Posts For Tyrel.2043:
No it does not give you any defense, however there is a trait somewhere which gives you protection when you apply an aura.
My question is however, that does it only burn targets attacking you in melee, or it burns from afar as well? E.g.: If a ranger shoots at me while I have my Fire Shield up, will he start burning?
Btw whenever you are in a team, burning is the most useless condition, everyone has it and it stacks in duration…
I’d say at lvl 80 you should get toughness up to 1100-1300 depending on how much trait points you have on Earth in your build, and leave all the rest for vitality. But generally this class can die horribly in any situation…
Weapon Choices
While leveling you can use any weapon you like and you’ll be fine – if you ask me I used Scepter / Dagger becaused it had ways more damage than any other weapon, but closing to lvl80 areas, Instances and WvW you are more and more forced to use a Staff.
Because of the squishiness of elementalist you really really need the 1200 range for any world event and instance coming your way. For solo fighting the other weapons would still be viable options, however roaming around Orr and other high level areas, the ‘hearts’ are gone. Instead, you have a crazy amount of events literally jumping at you, which require you to have a long range or die. The problem is, that we do not have weapon switching, and because of this you either have to run away out of combat to be able to switch from your bags (silly), or – being prepared for everything – stick to the staff.
In instances it’s not even a question, there are so many boss fights requiring you to have a long range that it’s not worth going there with anything but a staff.
I do know that we can switch attunements instead of weapons, the problem is that every attunement of a given weapon is essentially the same. Fire has more damage, Earth may bleed, Water may heal, etc. But, using a dagger they’re all melee skills, using a staff they’re all slow firing, long range skills, and the list goes on.
It’s a serious problem for the elementalist that the concept of their skills is determined by their weapon instead of their attunement.
If I want to fight with a dagger – because god why on earth shouldn’t I? – then I should have at least one attunement which has range, instead of being all of them melee. As elementalists can’t switch weapons in combat, they can very easily get into situations when they just cannot attack, even if they have 20 skills at their disposal instead of the usual 10. We have more, but a lot less differing skills.
A good example is my first time in Ascalonian Catacombs: I went with daggers, and when we reached the room with flame spitting traps all around the walls, I literally couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t attack them because all of my skills were melee and/or not projectile based, and was also stuck in combat, not having an option to switch for a ranged weapon. There go my four attunements, all being the same useless as the other.
This is what forces elementalists to stick to staves, that it is the only weapon which never fails you. The problem is, that with it we have the least possible weapon and skill options, however the statistics suggest the opposite.
General
Many people suggest condition damage gear, but I have to disagree here. It is good for leveling, I actually used it, but for the Staff it fails. Staff has a lot less means for condition damage than the other weapons… to be more specific the only condition it can efectively apply is burning. The problem with buring is however, that every second class can burn it’s target. Burning stacks in duration, not in intensity. In every non-solo fight, the burning we apply is useless because if at least 2-3 people hit something it will just keep burning for eternity and you will not have your own X stacks of burning on the target the way bleeding works. Instead your burns will always get overwritten by the other people and the target will just burn once. (for a long time that’s for sure, but most of that damage is not specifically yours)
If any of you bothered to read this far, I’ve chosen my end-game gear to be mostly “Valkyrie”, because ele needs Power, but also needs the Vitality to counter it’s squishiness. I’ve tried earth-based tank builds, pure dps builds, Berserker, Rampager and even Knight gear, and all that stuff, but none of them really worked well. I either did no damage, or died in an instant. Valkyrie and Arcane seems to be the best choice, even if for many reasons it also is bad. The negative you have to counter on it the most is the lack of precision.
I don’t know if I’m right about it, but I think that elementalist is as bad as it is mainly because it was only balanced for sPVP. However the majority of players do not, or only ocassionally play sPVP, so the class shouldn’t get balanced based only on that.
It might be balanced in sPVP, but it sure as hell is not in PVE. The most underpowered class at the moment, even worse as the commonly flamed Mesmer because that is at least fun to play, whereas the elementalist has all it’s options and strengths nerfed to oblivion.
Sorry for the long post ,had to let off the steam, I’m very mad at ele as it currently is…
(edited by Tyrel.2043)
Damage
There are three main problems with the damage of an elementalist, which are the following:
Unlike most other professions, many of your skills require your target to stand completely still to do any decent harm. (e.g. Fire Scepter against risen is a joke) This works well at first, but not on Orr with the speedy Risen all over the place. Same applies to instances, except if you have a Necro face-tanking everything with it’s pet armada.
I’ve played ele in BWE1 and It was a lot more useful back then. Now, if you want to do some damage, you’re forced to use Fire. Water doesn’t do any noticeable dps, Air is generally too weak as well… Only Earth has a chance to match the dps of fire, as long as you’re talking about single-target dps… But when you need AoE (and you usually need it), Fire is the plain winner again. I do understand that the attunements other than Fire have certain utility abilities, boons and conditions, or healing on them, but using them just does not worth it. Every decent elementalist I have seen this far during playing the game always used Fire, and only ever switched to the other attunements for a very short time, bursting everything on cooldown then switching back to fire as soon as possible. The damage on the other attuenements was nerfed ways too much.
Compared to some other professions, the base damage of elementalist skills is low. Engineer and Warrior packs a lot heavyer punch, Ranger does not but attacks a lot faster than you, and the list goes on… I’ve even seen Guardians out-dps me!?
ArenaNet, you made elementalist the squishiest of them all, which leads to it being a glass cannon. But currently it is only glass, without the cannon. I’ve literally seen a Warrior alone kill mobs faster than me and a fellow elementalist together ever could.
I’m not saying it’s useless, I can kill stuff, but would you mind explaining me why a guy wearing heavy armor, having twice the amount of base HP and using a class as complex as a wooden stick is allowed to kill a mob by using 2 skills at maximum? (and then he had bad luck in crit rolls).
You could say that if I combo my skills this way, or place that AoE before using something, etc. I could do the same amount of damage, but then I spent a good 5 seconds preparing for it, while other guy killed the sorry mob in 2secs without any clever tricks. Why can’t I, who plays the glass cannon?
Back to the low base damage, just a quick example: As you know, when you link a skill on to chat, the tooltip of the skill will show you the damage you would do with it if you had it, using your Power as the base.
Because of my build I usually have a minimum of 6-7 stacks of Might boons applied to me, with it I have over 2,4k Power and I also have +48% critical damage multiplier. With all this, the base damage of Fireball, Lava Font, Lightning Surge or any other high-damaging staff skill is still below or around 1000. Fireball does 2-2,5K criticals.
Having these stat’s I’ve asked a warrior to link Hundred Blades for me and I couldn’t believe my eyes… It had over 4,4k base damage (non-critical) with my stats, and even it’s final blow damage was higher than anything my Fire could do…
People usually say that: “ok it’s high damaging, but you aren’t supposed to stand before it”. Well hello, this is no excuse, Lava Font, Dragon’s Tooth and other, similarily “high-damaging” skills of the elementalist affecting a releatively small area can as easily be avoided as Hundred Blades… Even easier, because you see well ahead where the AoE will be, however these elementalist skills do the quarter of the damage the warrior has.
How on earth is this balanced?
Traits
Elementalist does not benefit as much from Traits as other classes do because our traits are not generally stronger, however they do have a lot more constraints. Every one of our passive traits (except Arcane) and many of our active Traits only ever have an effect if we are attuned to, or are attuning to a certain elements. Other classes aren’t so limited, they can put points in whatever trait line they want, and they are not forced to use a certain weapon or skill-set to benefit from those Traits.
The Traits of elementalist should be completely reworked to give us the same amount of flexibility. Passive Traits should give effects which we always benefit from, and we should also have some traits affecting our elementals.
(edited by Tyrel.2043)
/Agree with most of the above
The main problems with elementalist are at the end-game, PVE. The class does generally fine and the issues it has usually don’t bother the players, as long as they’re below level 70. Above it however, the class starts to lose ground against the others at an insane rate. I try to make categories to make it easier to comprehend. Also please note that I do not think the game is unplayable with elementalist, but I do think it takes a lot more effort and an experienced player to achieve the same effectiveness that many other professions have by default, regardless of build and player skill.
Survivability
The elementalist is the only light armored class with around 10,8k base hp. Generally you are very very squishy, and do not have more means of survival than the other classes. Staying at light armor wearers and scholars for comparison:
Necromancers are usually surrounded with pets, and even without them they usually have a bit more toughness and closely the double amount of HP than you do.
Mesmers have around 15k base HP, many defensive skills, distortion, disables and illusions at their disposal.
Guardians have as low HP as us elementalists as far as I know, however they have a lot more healing, aegis, many options for ‘protection’ and wear heavy armor.
Opposed to the above, as an ele you’re quite soft. Arcane Shield and Armor of Earth (and the Traits granting them) could temporarily help you and grant you a relatively nice amount of survivability… as long as they last, but both are easy to counter. You can run and dodge around too, but everyone else can do that just like you, so I’m not counting it in.
You can also have pets, but unlike Necro and Ranger, you can’t have your pet out for an unlimited time. Even Mesmers are better at this, even though their illusions die with their targets, they can always re-summon them and have them around. With elementalist, if your elemental dies, you are the tank for a long CD.
In conventional PVE situations you can manage, you can survive with just moving and dodging around… but when it comes to End-Game, you get to Orr. Risens are thrown at you by legions and they generally move a lot faster than you. Because of this you can only avoid their attacks for a very limited amount of time. Of course you can sacrifice your damage, and start running around like a crazy kid, only stopping every-now-and-then for a quick attack, but hey… other classes aren’t forced to do that.
In instances your squishiness is the worst curse ever. No matter how much necro minions, earth elementals, guardians and warriors are you surrounded with, the AI is mean, evil. All the mobs will just run after the squishiest team member: you. Even if you didn’t do as much as looking at them, they will generally chase you.
Furthermore, you die horribly from any AoE, DoT and stuff like that which others just survive without problems, simply because they have 1.5 times of your HP at the least.
If nothing else, at least our base HP should be imroved to the average 15k.
(edited by Tyrel.2043)