Guild Wars 2

Auric Basin – Getting stuck in transformation

When doing the competition challenges (for exalted armor) before the final battle it is possible afterwards to get stuck like you are still in the competition even after it has finished. This results with you being permanently in combat, and in case of a challenge like the west “Auction” you will be stuck with your whole partial (1-3,6-10) skill bar being locked.

Even suiciding and respawning at a waypoint doesn’t help to get back to normal. And if you are stuck with the “Auction” transformation you can also not use any other transformations (Exalted armor, Transformation consumables, Using north deployed turrets). You can however carry the north bundles and deploy the turrets (just not use them).

Unfortunately I have know further information about what actually causes the problem besides participating in an Exalted Armor competition.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole

They give a large buff to one of the minor traits and you call it hyperbole when I point out that you were wrong in saying that they didn’t change a single thing about the minor traits.

Sorry, but you are just an idiot or troll or both.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

It doesn’t do you well to assume. Minor Master is still just “swiftness on overloading” instead of at least swiftness on all channels.

What does the minor master trait have to do with a buff to the minor grandmaster trait? You specifically tried to claim that they didn’t change “a single thing” about the minor traits, but they did.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Wait they really didn’t change a single thing about the horrible tempest minor traits?

I assume you didn’t actually play the expansion yet, because one of the changes they did was a massive buff to the grandmaster minor.

Navzar.2938:

Vigorous Scepter- ????
25% higher endurance recharge in combat is weak and easily out shined by renewing stamina. Although I don’t know what to do with this, this trait needs a buff.

It is 50% (half of Vigor). The trait is actually really good. It is just that Renewing Stamina is insanely overpowered and they don’t stack.

Edit: Noticed that the wiki page says 25%. But I am fairly certain that when I tested it back in the autumn, it brought a full recharge from 20→15s, which is a 50% increase in recharge rate.

Sunspot&Earthen Blast-There’s already another thread on these. A simple burn/damage increase might be good.

Both of those are already fairly decent. Sunspot is better than the Lightning equivalent if you hit two enemies. Earthen Blast has the cripple which is very useful.

The trait itself I think is weak, but it’s already in a strong line. So I’m hesitant to say it needs a buff.

Generally my reasoning as well. Anyway, you missed a few:

• Burning Fire – 3s of burning on long cd utilities, except for Signet of Fire that has so long initial burn that it will generally be cleansed long before. Simply not worth it.
• Ember’s Might – Too weak for a major elementalist trait. Only reason to keep it this weak is because of being afraid to boost maximum dps build.
• Soothing Winds – This one is so horrible
• Arcane Lightning – A maximum 5.9% damage boost to crits only. Not really impressive. Similar to Ember’s Might.
• Diamond Skin – Is that supposed to be a grandmaster trait? Compared to what you can get from Written in Stone (and other grandmaster traits), Diamond Skin looks more like a Master trait at most.

Incredible work.

Although I guess some people on this forum will interpret the fact that you took a couple of hours to do it as elementalists being underpowered in PvE.

Arrow.4619:

You are assuming you have enough people alive at that point (an iffy proposition)

Yes, I assume that everyone are alive when the last phase starts.

1. All the previous phases are very easy.
2. If for some reason someone manages to get themselves killed earlier on, it is extremely easy to revive people in the second to last phase.

But hey keep ignoring the fact that you really, really need to have at least 2 guardians, and a combination of mesmers and rangers to actually complete this encounter.

The whole dungeon has been soloed by an elementalist.

Arrow.4619:

Hard is fine, but the golems on stage 3 in the Frizz encounter are ridiculous. Continuous ongoing invulnerability with about one in 10 shots damaging them, might stacks and auto-attack pummeling, pulls/pushes, stuns from them and the environment.

Also known as the “kite the golems continuously through the lasers to trigger their special abilities” strategy. A highly popular tactic among groups competing for the most wipes in a row title.

Personally I prefer the “have everyone on the same side and kill the last two golems without dying” strategy although it sucks if you want to wipe.

I am amused that people actually think AR is hard. In reality, it is actually a fairly easy dungeon compared to something like a Cataclysm WoW heroic.

The trash is basically super easy, stack and kill. The first boss is fairly trivial as long as everyone makes sure to stack up when killing the first golem so that everyone gets on the same side of the rotating walls (greatly improves focus fire, and reduces the risk of golems walking or pulling through walls). The final boss is simply trivial if everyone brings a few defensive utilities and/or AoE buffs/heals so that you can keep everyone near the boss to remove the stacks from the boss more easily. (the only annoying part is when you get into a bad group where several people manage to get themselves killed on the cannon phases)

Ptolomy.6984:

I was in swimming in wvw yesterday when some annoying krait stunned me. A habit of mine made me use cleansing fire. Now comes the strange part it still broke my stun.

Are you sure it was a stun and not an immobilize?

oZii.2864:

GoEP in air for weakness and it will proc on multiple people 10 in earth for protection on aura = them -83% damage

It is 67% damage reduction (50% on average as only every other hit glances) with both protection and weakness. (1*0.67*0.5=0.33)

stpetemermaid.5947:

Yes, I do use Ether Renewal. Which is why I could live with Cleansing Fire having less conditional removal, as opposed to losing the Break Stun. But changing to Arcane Shield, I lose the 3 stacks of Might from the Spell Slinger trait (Cantrip trait).

Just run LF+CF and enjoy the lower cds. LF still allows you to teleport to safety even though it doesn’t break the stun.

In situations where you need better escapability, just swap in AS for CF.

Razor.6392:

Don’t forget that it triggers the arcana minor trait on each attunement swap… so you basically get an extra 2.5 seconds of fury every 5 seconds.

Yup. If you go Fresh Air, you can skip out on getting Zephyr’s Boon, which means that you can get a more offensive air trait instead.

Demon.5082:

True but it would have made more sense to somehow incorporate this stunbreak into the defensive glyph we have instead of an offensive one.

What glyph are you talking about?

• Storms? That would be plain stupid as you don’t want to have stun break on a skill that you have to AoE target
• Renewal? Even more stupid. Massive cd and the likelyhood of having someone around to revive at the time you want to use it as a stunbreaker is small.
• Lesser Elemental? Not a bad choice but it has a long effective cd.
• Harmony? It is a heal, not a utility. Besides, putting a stunbreaker on it would make it overpowered.

Hence we come back to GoEP. It is simply the glyph that fits best both with cd and what kind of effect it has on usage. And GoEP could use a small boost anyway, so the stunbreak and probably instant cast is a nice upgrade.

Demon.5082:

Still scratching head about how to use it as a stunbreaker since not using it prefight is wasting buff time.

It is fairly simple. Either you go offensive and start the fight by using it, thereby risking getting stunned, or you go defensively and use it to gain an advantage after someone tries to stun you.

That is really no different than the current choice of using Lightning Flash offensively or defensively.

To be able to create interesting and varied PvE encounters while maintaining a balance, there is a strong need to normalize certain key values. World of Warcraft is an example of how to do things right, at least in WotLK and Catalcysm (haven’t played MoP). The content developers know how much survivability a non-tank will have. They know (approximately) how much damage a damage dealer will do, and so on. They know that every group should consist of a certain number of damage dealers, tanks and healers. All of that gives them the opportunity to create good challenging PvE content.

In GW2, none of that exists. The GW2 setup works well enough PvP, but it is a nightmare for PvE content developers.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. A huge target group of mainstream mmorpgs are people who completely suck at everything they do.

The reason for this is that mmorpgs hides the incompetence of people via grinding and grouping.

Why do you think that the Mad Clock Tower got and Crab Toss gets so many complaints. The answer is simple. Those activities can’t be brute forced, nor can someone else easily carry you through them.

If the mesmer portal didn’t exist, jumping puzzles in general would get far more complaints than they are getting right now.

Stone Splinters is a fairly bad choice. At 100-125 stat points worth it not generally competitive as a major trait. Earth’s Embrace, Elemental Shielding (with two Auras) And Signet Mastery (with Written in Stone) are all objectively stronger traits.

The rest is just fine, although I have to say that Minion of Vey has a really good point about Signets.

It is also worth considering if a Fire’s Embrace build (Elemental Shielding, Geomancer’s Freedom, Written in Stone, Renewing Stamina, Zephyr’s Boon, Fire’s Embrace and one crappy first tier fire trait) would be better, but it is really difficult to say for sure. Specifically, that first tier of fire is painful, as it means picking up the same kind of crappy trait I just degraded. But with Fire’s Embrace being as powerful as it is, it is possibly worth it. On the other hand, it would mean giving up Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana that are also powerful.

kostbabis.8791:

Eles werent close to 50% uptime of prot unless you go forge runes either!!

Umm….

30 arcane Elementalists gets 43.3% protection with a standard 15s rotation. If you speed up the rotation you can get up to 57%. If you are running Armor of Earth cantrip, that is up to 8.7% heavily frontloaded protection. (meaning that you can get 21s of continuous protection in a fight)

showatt.9413:

And the RTL changes make it hard for elem to just cheese out of combat whenever they feel like it.

I thought the general claim made by everyone was that the elem was an invincible bunker with massive in-combat sustainability. Why would he ever need to cheese out of combat….unless the people complaining about the elementalist bunker are lying through their teeths.

showatt.9413:

You post troll post? You get troll response.
You won’t care? Kthx bye.
I’d like to spent my time discussing classes with more rationale individuals instead.

And the troll of the month goes to…

This guy.

Edit: Edited to make reference more clear

LightningBlaze.4913:

I just consider the 0/10/0/30/30 or 0/0/10/30/30 to be extremely boring and very forgiving.

Of course, that is the whole point of it. To create a build not built for any specific special purpose, but instead simply picking the generically best traits one by one. That is why it works well with both defensive and offensive gear. The build itself carries very little bias.

This also makes it the build in the game that most clearly highlights the failure of Anet’s irrational and reactive approach to balancing traits in gw2.

Aedil.1296:

What do u guys think about this?

Fuzzion.2504:

….
30 Point trait that removes a condi upon gaining regen will have a 5 second CD (Trait is dead).

Anyone who thinks Cleansing Water is dead because of a small 5s internal cd is someone whose opinion I simply can’t take seriously.

That is what I think. Cleansing Wave has an 11.375s minimum cd and that doesn’t stop anyone from taking that trait.

ThiBash.5634:

Does anyone have any idea how it can be done?

It can’t be in PvP. Either you use Elemental Attunement or Signet build. In either case, boons are a massive part of your defense and offense.

cero.1209:

*Version 1: *(this build is pretty standard for what is used right now, the one problem i did encounter is that because of the boons being so easy to proc that with the new “x” effect against target with “y” amount of boons that it could lead to some trouble.)
(copy and paste link)
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=Vm33;0J0R0-P0-5wM-Z0;9;499-JT2;00;304-45ALo0;0o0-PcW5PcW56BM

Ah god. I almost vomited at the first trait. Seriously, Ember’s Might? Please don’t post that kind of crappy trait in a theory-crafting thread. Even with 100% uptime, which you won’t have, it would provide only 100 stat points worth with your gear. Horrible horrible trait.

Anyway, why don’t you swap out Arcane Blast for Mist Form, switch Ember’s Might for Spellslinger and Alacrity for Soothing Disruption. (or Cantrip cd reduction if you really don’t want the regeneration and vigor)

Oh, and I won’t bother even responding to your second build. No Elemental Attunement? That is simply instant loss. That trait is easily worth 500+ stat points. If you are that afraid of having someone exploiting your boons, then you have already lost.

Edit: Even so, you are only gaining very little offensive power in total (as you are losing out on Bountiful Power) and you are losing condition removal, hitpoints and healing power.

cero.1209:

I am actually some what excited. Time for some new build to come out, im pretty excited to see what the community will come up with to work around the new changes.

No need to workaround, because there is nothing to work around. The changes has no impact whatsoever on top level viable builds.

Dagger off-hand remains the only viable weapon choice, far ahead of Focus and Staff. x/x/x/30/30 remains the only viable trait setup base. If anything, it gets slightly more locked in place by cementing the requirement for condition removal via Evasive Arcana. Cantrips remain the only viable option for utility outside of specialty builds.

Or did you expect that these changes would make going deep water bad? If so, then you are just kidding yourself. Deep water is obligatory for the minor traits alone. And a small internal cd won’t remove Cleansing Waters from the top 10 major trait list, nor will it have a huge impact Soothing Disruption. The frontloaded Vigor and Regeneration are enough to carry that trait.

Escthiil.3210:

Though, one thing to note that as compared to skills like Rush, RTL is not affected by Cripple. That’s a huge advantage.

Though, one thing to note as compared to skills like RTL, Rush is effected by swiftness and doesn’t prevent you from using instant casts. That’s a huge advantage.

Seriously, what else would you run in PvP.

Both Staff and Scepter relies on your opponents being completely incompetent idiots that get hit by sloooooooooow hitting AoE. While Focus is overpowered vs projectile weapons and massively underpowered vs anything else.

Lucyfer.9517:

What on earth does grouping for dungoens have to do with being social? Dungeon runners are the most antisocial people i ever met. Faster, skip, skip, faster, drama, drama, whine, whine, skip faster, faster, skip, skip, drama, kick. Yeah social as kitten :P

The whole “you must be part of a group” is basically the pinnacle of propaganda in modern society. It really doesn’t make any sense that limiting the amount of people you have to interact with should be be considered good social behavior. That is, until you realize that creating good social behavior has never been the goal.

Grouping is simply a way of turning people more anti-social, so that they are more easily controlled. If you want to control a population, the last thing you want is for people to actually care about everyone else, because then you won’t be able to play people against each other.

The fastest/best build for leveling is probably the Lightning Hammer build (20 points in fire for Conjurer and the rest in water). It has sick damage and an AoE blind on every third swing.

At level 80, the basic build is:

• Minimum of 15 points in water (preferably 25)
• Minimum of 10 points in arcane (preferably 20)
• Elemental Attunement required
• Your picks of the following traits: Spellslinger, Zephyr’s Boon, Earth’s Embrace, Soothing Disruption, Cleansing Wave, Powerful Aura, Cleansing Water, Hydromancer’s Alacrity, Blasting Staff, Renewing Stamina, Evasive Arcana
• Any gear
• Focus on cantrips for utility, especially if cantrip traits are picked

Merlin.4058:

Ordinary events like what? Escort the Merchant type quests? Well those take forever to do because the guy keeps dying with only one person guarding him.

No they don’t. Well, not most of the time. At least for my alts.

Anyway, Kessex Hills for example has around 45 non-group events. These include capturing/defending camps, escorting people, blowing up an Ettin Cave, clearing an Ettin roadblock, rescuing people, kill a veteran mob, destroy bandit cannons, collapse a destroyer fissure and more. All soloable (although the bandit cannon one is a tough one if you are under the recommended level). Other zones have similar amounts of events.

Also, if there aren’t a lot of people in a zone, then there will tend to be quite a few events just waiting for someone to come along.

I’m under the delusion that other people are moving over to do these events when they are probably sitting for SB to spawn again.

Level 80s use timers to come in close to the spawn time and then kill only SB because its has a chest plus guaranteed rare on the first kill on that account per day. Just like they then do for Maw, Fire Elemental, Shatterer, Claw of Jormag, Dragon with annoying name and a few other events with guaranteed chest+rare.

If those chests didn’t exist, the same people would just do karma train farming in Orr instead, or farm CoF path 1.

Most of the ones you’ll find running around non-max level zones are those getting map completion for an alt, doing Living Story content or generally just doing relaxing content. And that is really no different than any other MMO. Well, it is slightly different actually. In any other MMO you wouldn’t find many people just doing relaxing content, because they would one shot anything in a lower level zone.

Merlin.4058:

Problem is, I’m not having fun. I want to do other events, I want to see what else is out there. The problem is that I die when I try to do these events. Why? Because I’m not level 80 yet with the best gear in the game. Why do I need to be that decked out? Because no one else is trying to do these events. And the Blood Witch kills me. And liberating Ascalon Settlement takes forever alone.

Umm, I think I see your problem.

You do know that you just listed two events clearly marked as group events in the game. Why are you under the delusion that you are supposed to easily solo those. Especially the Blood Witch that is a boss event.

In fact, every kitten event you have mentioned in this thread so far are group events from what I can tell. It looks like you are suffering from the “ordinary events are beneath me” syndrome.

Blackhat.4016:

No updates yet but I found something else which might be interesting:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Analysis-of-Cantrips-Eles/first

JonathanSharp.7094:

Very well written Symbolic.

Great write-up. Just so you guys know, we’re trying to bring down the cantrip Ele, while also being careful to let other Ele builds work. We don’t want to just take all Ele’s out of play, but we do need to bring a few things down (traits/skills) in efficacy.

Let’s hope they are doing a good job and give us some more viable builds (even though it sounds like they only want to nerf the cantrips)!

If they just nerf the cantrips, then I have lost all faith in them.

It should be fairly obvious to anyone with a brain that the so called “cantrip elementalist” (actually just your standard 30Water/30Arcane build) isn’t about cantrips at all. Just look at the build itself. Its water major traits are: “Soothing Disruption”,“Cleansing Wave”,“Cleansing Water”.

Notice anything missing from that list of traits. If you answered “Cantrip Mastery”, then you are a winner. This so called “cantrip elementalist” build doesn’t even bother picking up a reduced cd on cantrips.

And for good reason. The cantrips are fillers to begin with. We just take them because the rest of our utility is horrible (except Signet of Earth and Arcane Shield) and due to Soothing Disruption we can get some extra on demand condition removal via Cleansing Water, as well as some minor vigor. But really, the cantrips themselves are crappy enough that the main spec can’t even be bothered to reduce the cd on them.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Very well written Symbolic.

Great write-up. Just so you guys know, we’re trying to bring down the cantrip Ele, while also being careful to let other Ele builds work. We don’t want to just take all Ele’s out of play, but we do need to bring a few things down (traits/skills) in efficacy.

There is currently no other workable elementalist builds for a reason. You give elementalists far less base stats than other classes, and force them to compensate by picking a few massively overpowered traits in Water/Arcane, which they have been doing from the beginning (as in beta weekends) and have been more or less balanced around. (although the optimal picks in all categories creates some synergy that leaves them slightly ahead of other classes)

These traits are not just 10-20% better than other traits. Instead they are 100-200+% better. And any attempt at nerfing them down so that other traits become usable will totally destroy the elementalist class, as it has been completely and utterly balanced around those traits since beta.

Also, people talk about the cantrips. But really, the only reason the cantrips and their related traits are any good is because they and their traits synergize well with the more powerful traits. Nerfing the cantrips and their traits wouldn’t change a thing except make the elementalist even more locked into the x/x/x/30/30 build.

I mean, what are you going to do?

• Nerf Cleansing Water? Water minors are too good, so we’ll run Alacrity, Cleansing Wave and Soothing Disruption instead.
• Nerf Soothing Disruption (again)? Just run Alacrity instead.
• Nerf both? Just go 25 water, as the water minors are still too good.
• Nerf water minors? The majors are still better than the Air/Fire/earth ones.
• Nerf water majors and minors? Congratulations, you just killed the elementalist class period.

Arcane is even more locked in place. Worst case scenario, you mess up and no-one plays elementalist any more. Best case scenario, every single elementalist migrates to the emergency signet specialty spec, that has even less choices in regards to traits and utility.

The only way you can properly balance things is by doing a massive rebalancing of every single trait, including significant defensive utility on traits in the more offensive trait lines. (especially the grandmaster ones)

LaCorpse.6750:

I see, I just think its out of place. They could have come up with a better place for a gold sink.

And what would that better place be? Skins are optional, yet wanted by many. That is pretty much the perfect gold sink place.

If someone is low level and can’t afford it (pretty much bullkitten as money isn’t that hard to come by at low levels thanks to zone completions, dailies and monthlies) then they can’t afford it. Skins are optional cosmetic items. They aren’t a necessity that you must have.

The logic of caps on AoE

• buffs is that it promotes stacking up.
• debuffs/damage in PvE is that mobs are incredibly stupid by design.
• debuffs/damage in PvP is that ….. players are incredibly stupid by design???

Seriously, this thread is quite funny. The by far most common argument for the AoE limit in WvW seems to be “People are zergballing because of the AoE limit, so we can’t remove the AoE limit”. What a wonderful example of circular reasoning.

And people keep repeating it over and over again in different variations. The only AoE spell that would really become more powerful if the AoE limit is removed is Meteor Shower as it is the only spell that has any real potential to hit more than 5 people who aren’t zergballing. Worst case scenario? Nerf MS a bit.

I can understand the AoE limit on players from a technical standpoint. Perhaps it is difficult to differentiate between players and mobs when assigning damage. What do you do when 6 mobs and 3 players are within the AoE effect? If 5 mobs are closest to the center, do you stop counting after you reach the fifth mob, or do you continue iterating over all nearby objects to see if anyone of them are players. It could cause performance issues in case you have many mobs in an area.

Performance issues due to too many players getting hit is probably irrelevant. If for some reason lots of players get hit by the same AoE effects (they can’t avoid zergballing out of habit?), they will simply die faster, thereby quickly reducing the size of the battle and thereby minimizing lag.

All the AoE limit does it make small groups useless because the larger group can hit more targets.

Pretty much. Having no AoE limit on damage serves to make fights between groups of different sizes a bit more even, which is a good thing as you get less facerolling and more exciting battles. You also reward the use of terrain to your advantage.

i mainly do wvw and run staff, and i think it’s fine at 5. If AoEs hit everyone, it would be waaay to powerful. I never get more than 5 people in my AoEs for long anyway,

So, AoE would be way too powerful because they would hit the no more than the at most 5 people you usually have in your AoE circles anyway? Great reasoning there….

It’s been said that removing the AE cap won’t solve zerg balls because of things like retaliation and confusion.

Which is a plain lie and doesn’t hold up to reasonable logic. If one person dies from retaliation while severely harming a zergball, that would be considered a good trade. As for confusion? Ah kitten I just responded to a troll didn’t I. Ah well, at least I didn’t waste much time doing so.

and what stops a zerg doing the exact same?

Nothing

Offensive AoE (without limits) simply acts to create diminishing returns in the usefulness of bringing more people too a fight, meaning that the smaller side will be at somewhat less of a disadvantage.

By reducing the effective power difference between the larger and smaller sides you are creating a game where more fights become interesting instead of simply one side facerolling the other.

In the same manner, removing defensive AoE caps would be a mistake, since that would serve to increase the gap between the smaller and larger side.

killcannon.2576:

The healing limit would also need to be removed, but not the buff limit.

The healing and buff limits have the exact same purpose as no limit on AoE-damage would have. Namely, to reduce incentives for people to stand close to each other. So I don’t see any real reason to change the healing limit.

Lillian Wandom Hale.7102:

Earth 30 :

• Obsidian Focus
• Earth’s Embrace
• Geomancer’s Freedom (or Alacrity)

Water 30 :

• ( Mainly use it for Vit, use whatever Trait’s you’d like, I suggest either Cantrips Traits or all those AoE Regen/Heals/Condition Removals )

Arcana 10

• Final Shielding

• Remove 10 points from Earth.
• Throw Obsidian Focus directly into the waste basket where it belongs.
• Add another 10 points into Arcane.
• Get Elemental Attunement.

And I have just boosted your and your groups survivability significantly.

FateZero.8536:

Some said due to the patch resetting some things, they got additional 10 Laurels from PVP on top of the 10 Laurels they’ve already gotten from PVE. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Basically, the GW2 servers make use of daily and monthly resetting counters for various things. The most obvious are the ones that track number of completed sub-dailies and sub-monthlies as they are shown. But there exists other ones as well, such as a daily counter for megaboss kills.

After this patch, there now exists a new “Number of monthly achievements
completed” counter.

But since the counter didn’t exist before the patch, it would automatically be set to 0 after the patch. Hence when someone completes the PvP monthly achievement after the patch it would get increased to 1, and they would get awarded 10 laurels for “first monthly achievement completion”.

SneakyErvin.3056:

People keep asking why people are upset about ascendant gear. Here is a short asnwer.

It has to much impact on PvP and it forces PvPers into PvE. Something that should not happen when a game is so centered around a special PvP area.

It has an impact on

• WvWers.
• People playing with alts.
• People wanting to play some other games for a few months.
• People with little time.

Really, the only ones it doesn’t impact is the stereotypical “I play my main 5+ hours per day” content locust players that frequently pop into this thread to tell everyone how good this change is.

It is a simple matter of taking the whole “Design for casuals” motto in the wrong direction. The GW2 developers did the classic mistake of mistaking “casuals” for “newbies”. This is basically a trap that WoW has created to cause other mmos to fail.

The reason open world content in WoW has gotten easier and easier as the game went on is not because casuals demand it like a lot of mmo developers seem to think. Instead it is simply that the developers of WoW has structured the game into three parts:

• Leveling content – Class mechanic tutorial (as class mechanics change for each expansion, this works well).
• Max level outdoor content – Easy daily grind content to get people to join in brainlessly every day. Quite frankly, this is probably the weakest part of WoW as I have heard of very few people enjoying it.
• Dungeons and Raids – Main content that use a mix of difficulty levels and vertical gear progression to ensure that a relatively small amount of actual content is reused to its most. You get to do everything from going through heroic dungeons in crappy blue gear, to going from them in proper heroic dungeon gear, to facerolling them in epic raiding gear (yes, facerolling in overpowered gear is an intended feature to extend the lifetime of said dungeons).

Where GW2 developers messed up is by thinking that they could make dungeons the main content in a horizontal gear progression PvE game. The simple fact is that it doesn’t work, because they don’t have tools needed to extend dungeon lifetime enough. (you basically need some kind of vertical progression for that)

To make a proper Horizontal Progression PvE game, you need to widen the base of available content to allow it to cater to people of all skill levels. That means you need outdoor content that isn’t brainless. The reason GW1 survived and thrived for all these years is because the vast majority of its content was for max level players, and they eventually also introduced hard mode to further extend the value of all that content. That meant that they could have content for all skill levels.

In GW2, even the max level Orr content isn’t for max geared players. Instead it very much feels designed in the same way as WoW dailies. Faceroll easy content that feels like it is designed for beginners, not casuals, with only very few exceptions. This is the result that a lot of players warned of after Anet eased up the open world content after BWE1. It is one thing to have beginner zones. It is a completely other thing to neglect non-beginners.

Anyway, the way the Anet developers are trying to salvage their mess is not by fixing the open world content, but instead by introducing vertical progression to prolong dungeon content. But really, that makes them a direct competitor to WoW and Rift that are far better at that kind of stuff.

Thorough testing can take time and effort, but that’s not the case with the current wave of kitten-ups. If they were edge cases or hard to set up, then I’d cut them a bit more slack, but it looks like they didn’t do any testing at all on these changes.

That, to me, speaks volumes about how they see us (as players) and the entire Elementalist class. It’s not worth wasting one single minute of QA time on our changes and it’s not worth one single forum post to even acknowledge our concerns.

It is fairly obvious that whatever developer worked on Magnetic Grasp/RtL actually played around with the elementalist.

It is equally obvious that the “class balance people” only changed numbers in files, and never spent a single minute actually playing the elementalist.

It is fairly disgusting actually now that you think about it. They are making balance changes to the elementalist without even playing the profession. And as you point out, the introduced bugs and failed fixes are pretty much absolute proof of it.

Mik Hell.8206:

It’s not 60%, it’s 30: you go from 15s base to 9, 9.x actualy, but it’s definitely 10>cd>9.

It is 60% increased recharge rate.

15/1.2=12.5
15/1.4=10.714
15/1.6=9.375

That only affects bunkers though. It doesn’t affect play style or efficiency of other builds, which is were a lot of the qq is coming from.

Agreed. The healing ripple change is not that huge if you don’t use healing power gear.

The Evasive Arcane nerf on the other hand is a big problem for all elementalist specs as Evasive Arcana was the best dps trait that the elementalist had. Far better than the crappy traits in the Fire and Air lines.

Bardes.1870:

Maybe this is the reason that Anet think asc gears are fine. Someone will eventually pay — when they are out of patient.

It is the basic strategy in F2P games. Make it disgustingly time intensive to get top end gear, but provide a massive shortcut if you are willing to pony up the cash. Generally you want to make the shortcut indirect, as that makes the intent less obvious. Otherwise you may actually get labeled as a P2W game.

The people in charge of monetization at Anet panicked when they realized that they had screwed up by making Exotics achievable to casuals without them buying gold. Hence the introduction of Ascended gear.

haviz.1340:

EA was a gimmick, never intended to trigger blast finisher (obviously).

It was very much intended to be a blast finisher. They did some rather big work on the trait in late beta. If it wasn’t supposed to be a blast finisher, then they would definitely have fixed it at that time.

The whole “unintended” is simply yet another Anet lie and if in anything it pisses me of more than the actual change. It was a completely unneeded word that was put into the patch notes only because they needed an excuse as they expected these threads from the start.

The trait is so-so now. Not bad, but not good either.

Pluses

• Has a potential decent stat point worth due to the water dodge.
• Is reachable without taking any crap majors.

Minuses

• Harsh requirement of having to waste a dodge and being in water for good effect.
• Arcane grandmaster minor is worthless.
• 60% arcane recharge is overkill. You only gain 1.33s compared to 20 arcane. And unlike the 1.8s you gain going from 10-20, these last 10 points have less rotational meaning.

Ditrah.5128:

That’s a bad example for the simple reason that those guilds could never complete the whole raid due to number maths. Gear-check bosses does not exist in the same way in GW2.

…….

Agony is the ultimate gear check stat, designed specifically for gear checking.

Ditrah.5128:

I’m surprised over this reaction I have to say, it’s not that big of a deal really.
This is not a “gear-treadmill” for the simple reason that there is NOTHING in this game you can’t do in lvl 80 blues, that is the main difference and it is still there.

It was possible to raid most of Icecrown Citadel in blues. That didn’t make WoW any less of a gear-treadmill.

• Armor Of Earth didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Healing Rain didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Churning Earth didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip.
• Phoenix didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Fix the tooltip
• Evasive Arcana didn’t do what the description said. Solution: Nerf it to hell.

So my question isn’t why Evasive Arcana was nerfed. obviously that blash finisher was unintended.

My question is why Churning Earth, Phoenix, Armor of Earth and Healing Rain were nerfed to hell. Because using the same logic, it was obviously unintended for Phoenix to only have 5s vigor, and unintended for Churning Earth to not explode when you released the 5 button.