Guild Wars 2

HoT introduced so much AoE CC that pvp is broken now and there is no fix for it because you would have to remove all the elites specs from the game and start over again, with a completely new design. The question if there should be passive or active cc break is such a minor detail that it doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme.

How do you feel about the disadvantage of locking yourself out of earth #4 and #5 with this squishy build?

Give us an F5 Button that lets us instantly flip attunments. So if we where in fire/earth, we flip so we have earth/fire. Example: If a weaver is in a dire situation where he needs to use obsidian flesh, but he is currently attuned in fire/air, he attunes to earth, gets the 4 second attunement cooldown to attune to something else but is immediately able to flip attunents so he can make use his offhand skill right away.

This I think is the best compromise we can get:

1) It doesn’t take away much of the original concept of weaver, it even improves the idea of playing around with the elements
2) It gives us more flexibility, making the class more fun to play
3) It doesn’t make the weaver OP since there is still a cooldown attached to attuning to new elements
4) It fixes the main issue of locking the offhand skills away

But please do not make this a utility. This idea is fixing a major design flaw and it’s not the players task to fix design flaws by sacrificing utility slots.

Edit: You could even put it on the “tab” weapon slot change.

Donald J. Trump made a great suggestion in your video comments. I tried the variations from your build he suggests (particularly taking dagger over focus) and it’s incredibly strong. You get ride the lightning as a gap closer right when you set up your burst, you can lock people down with earth #4 when bursting and it has 3 combo finishers in a fire field. With ether renewal, soothing disruption and cleansing water you also have a ton of condition hate. So basically, sword/dagger brings back the dagger/dagger playstyle, just with a more fixed rotation. Leaving the rotation when you have to and getting back into it will require some time to master.

@cursE We have enough condition removal and healing to tank every other condition spec in the game. Scourge is just clearly over tuned atm. I’m pretty sure the bunker build could still tank them despite that.

Well ok I’m talking about the second build. Not playing elementalist to be a bunker. If that’s our destiny for the next two years I might not even buy Path Of Fire.

When getting condi bombed you need to cleanse at least four conditions instantly or you’re dead. And I mean on demand, active condition cleanse. Where is that happening in the build? Passive condition cleanse happens all the time during the rotation which means about half of it will be on cooldown when the situation arises where you need it.

Well, you mentioned it yourself, if you see a necro you have to run. Because weaver has no condition cleanse. Unfortunately, necro is not the only condition class in the game. So even though this might be the best weaver build in the game, it won’t be viable. Thanks for sharing anyway.

Good look planning 4-7 seconds ahead like “yeah in 5.6 seconds that ranger is gonna shoot me, better prepare my focus earth skills.”

FrownyClown.8402:

My advice to anet is remove this 4s lockout from attunements and increase the range of our leaps. This is easily the worst spec

Yeah, these sword leaps are supposed to be gap closers yet their range is 450. It’s like Arenanet is making fun of us.

I’m giving up on this elite spec which is awful to play and unable to compete in pvp but maybe you want to keep trying so I’m sharing the d/d rotation I worked out. Focus is of course out of the game because weaver locks you out of your #4,5 skills and sword is just awful because you’ll easily be kited.

Assume you start in fire/water and use your new burning speed/water hybrid skill #3 to deal some damage. Then you attune to air/fire, lay down a fire field and use your #3 hybrid which is a blast finisher, followed by earth/air which grants you access to ride the lightning and updraft, which you can combine with earth#2, hybrid #3 to deal some close range damage. After that, you attune to water/earth and wait until the attunement cooldown has expired. Then you use the #3 hybrid (let’s call it muddy speed) to stun foes so you can immediately go to fire/water and use your burning speed hybrid again.

If anyone can get this thing to work with the correct traits, amulet, runes and sigils, feel free to share your experience. A good synergy that I noticed is using arcane blast in earth attunement with elemental surge trait as a gap closer.

The longer I think about it the more clear it becomes to me that there is only one chance to prevent weaver from becoming a huge disappointment: Completely remove the attunement cooldowns and balance the rest of the skills in a way so that the elementalist doesn’t become completely overpowered.

But I’ve been playing this game for 4 years now and as I know Arenanet, they will just decrease the “we lock you out of every attunement for 4 seconds and force you into a fixed rotation” cooldown by 10% and leave the mechanic as broken as it is.

Cooldown kills the fun of this class.

Jekkt.6045:

global cooldown on elements feels terrible. takes away all the reactive gameplay and usually you don’t even stay in an element for 4 seconds.

This. Global cooldown indeed feels terrible. Elementalist gameplay is based on reacting to a certain situation and attuning to an element where you will find what you need. Weaver kills this idea on two levels:

1) Global cooldown doesn’t allow you to react anymore, it forces a rotation with fixed order. Fixed because if you mess it up, it’s really hard to go back to it because the order of attunements matters now for your most important #3 skills.
2) Offhand skills are not directly accessible anymore.

I guess you must play a rotation with weaver like old d/d times. There’s no way to avoid it in pvp.

With the weaver, the elementalist appears to become more complex and naturally, it’s hard to see the design philosophy when you’re overwhelmed by an insane amount of possibilities. After taking a look into the new sword weapon skills and the weaver traits, it became quite clear to me what Arenanet intends to do and what the meta in PvE might look after the release of the addon.

My assumption is that the weaver meta will be an earth/fire power/condition hybrid relying on burning, bleeding and direct damage. Why? Take a look at the sword earth skills in this video:

0:48

Earth Sword #1 will be a mix of direct damage and bleeding. Earth Sword #2 is a blast finisher, again with direct damage and bleeding. The hybrid skill will deal direct and burning damage.

Here are the sword fire skills:

1:22

Again, we see a mix of condition and direct damage. So these five skills make perfect sense to become a rotation while swapping between earth and fire.

(fire,earth) fire/earth hybrid #3 -> 3x auto attack -> fire #2 -> attune to earth (earth, fire) earth #2 (combo finisher in fire field) -> 3x auto attack -> back to fire, repeat

It becomes even more evident if you consider the fact that dual attunement lets you benefit from the passive toughness and power boni you get from the earth and fire traitlines at the same time. Here is a link to the fire/earth traits that would synergize a lot with the new sword skills and weaver traits.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFgdAlNIIAYRAIUeAmYwOoIA-TRx0wAEU/B2+DGU+B4EAaBIrEEA-e

The weaver traits are shown here:

3:10

The traits for this build would be superior elements, weaver’s prowess and elements of rage. Elemental polyphony would constantly grant you +120 power and +120 toughness. With sigil of accuracy on one of your weapons and sigil of fire as utility, you get about 20% crit chance without any precision gear. Now for the synergies:

+ 270 power
+ 270 toughness
+ 10 % toughness converted to condition damage
+ 10% power converted to condition damage
+ 10% damage increase against burning
+ 5% damage against bleeding

Not mentioned are the flat condition damage and duration increases from your other traits and weapon sigils/runes. The rune of choice would be the superior rune of the berserker. If you get some precision from your gear and get 30-40% critical chance, you could even benefit from the 14% power to ferocity bonus from elements of rage. You will have permanent fury because of a blast finisher in your fire field every 8 seconds and the persisting flames trait.

With primordial stance, the weaver has a strong damage utiltiy that synergizes well with this build.

2:22

So, a typical rotation would look like this:

Start in (fire, earth), cast sigil of fire (and maintain the passive effect), cast primordial stance, fire/earth hybrid #3 -> 3x auto attack -> fire #2 -> attune to earth (earth, fire) earth #2 -> 6x auto attack -> back to fire (now with 6x auto attack), repeat and keep on cooldown. One Rotation will be around 16 seconds, 8 seconds for each attunement because the sword #2 skills have 8s cooldowns. By taking the cooldown reduction traits in earth and fire, one rotation would take about 12 seconds.

The elite would give you even more condition damage and toughness and reduce the cooldown of attunement changes to 2s, meaning that you could build in double fire and double earth attunement to gain access to your regular sword #3 skills and the 10% damage effect from elements of rage. If you chose focus as an offhand weapon, your survival abilities earth #4 and #5 would be immediately available 75% of the time.

What do you think will the new pve meta be?

Sure, if you run a full berserker build with signet of earth and arcane blast, you will instagib a lot of opponents. As well as thieves will instagib you. But this is more or less a troll build that doesn’t have a place in serious competitive pvp for a reason. If you play a more healing based build, which is the current meta, then no, you won’t kill good players with it. I’ve played staff for a long time and I know its strengths and weaknesses. And 1v1 is certainly not on the strengths list.

Staff shines if you are going more or less untouched, cast a lot of AoE in teamfights and kite if you get focused. D/F shines when playing against organized teams where people work together to lock you down and it’s also better in 1v1s.

Staff is a really good choice as a weapon in team fights but you have to distinguish between the levels of pvp:

In the pro league with opponents communicating over teamspeak, you will not see staff because the defensive capabilities of focus are necessary to avoid being locked down.

In soloq or non-professional ranked play however, staff is one of the most underrated weapons in the entire game. Because basically every spell you cast is worth 3x the damage/cc/healing than what you get from d/f. You also have great kiting capabilites with fire #4 and water #4. As long as you’re not locked down by a team who knows what they’re doing, staff makes the biggest difference in a teamfight.

In 1v1 however, staff won’t kill anything except the worst players.

Masochism ^_^

:(

Why would you wear the ascension when the precursor looks so much better.

I have a great idea: Let’s put all good players in one team and all the bad players in the other team. I haven’t done all my calculations yet, but I’m pretty sure this will lead to balanced and exciting games.

Now that is an epic screencap.

Incredible outfit, fantastic colour scheme, and astounding shot.

Perfect!

Thank you for your kind feedback My outfits are changing quite rapidly atm, but I think this new one is a keeper.

The blazing light folks. The blazing light.

@sarrs your logic… there could be 8 power classes and 1 completely op condi class and you’d probably still be like “it can’t be op, it’s 1:8…..”

Climbing ranks is actually fun in other games where the combat system hasn’t been destroyed, the pvp gameplay is fun and build diversity is existent.

You look down at your debuffs and see 19 stacks of bleeding.

“Oh kitten, that needs to be removed”.

First condi cleanse: Chill has been removed.

“kitten stupid kitten*ng game I’m dying here”.

Second condi cleanse: Weakness has been removed.

“How the hell is this cheesy kitten even a thing?”.

Third condi cleanse: Nothing happens.

“Oh I’m downed”.

Ok seriously now: There are good reasons why this game is dying.

Don’t play pvp, it’ll make you quit the game again right away. Play pve, given that you’re among the lucky ones who don’t experience consistent game crashes in big blobs, e.g. in dragons stand. Because there is still no map slot reserved for you to enable you to rejoin the same map.

What do you expect? The best thing about this game for many people was the combat, sure there were always issues, but the way the HoT powercreep made combat very tedious and generally increased the level of cheese, plus the way elite specs largely removed any sort of variation, basically destroyed the combat, so lots of people quit / play less.

Sums it up quite well. They wanted to make everyone buy HoT and therefore introduced way too op stuff for elite specializations. Which killed the combat. Now large numbers of players leave the game and probably won’t buy the second expansion. Classic long term fail.

Play a faceroll build.

In every game I play, pvp plays an important role for me. I’ve been playing GW2 since release and have always been playing spvp/wvw for the sake of fun, not the rewards. But the current state of pvp is an absolute disaster. Even WITH those rewards given (I really want these wings) I can’t get myself to play more than 3 games before I’ve lost my entire motivation for the current day.

When you play MMOs, at some point you will likely encounter a situation where you want a reward but the grinding towards it becomes “work” instead of fun. Which is ok, I get it. If there weren’t some obstacles, everyone would have those things and they weren’t special anymore. But if a gamemode becomes so unenjoyable that even those rewards can’t get you into playing it anymore, something went seriously wrong.

I’m not a pro player, I’m not a bad player. I play SoloQ and have 34 games won and 14 games lost. I should be happy. My class has a strong build and I win a lot more games than I lose and I should be satisfied with the result. But I’m not. Because even though I want these rewards, even though I’m succesful in pvp, I absolutely hate playing this gamemode now. And the reason is complete design failure.

1) Lack of build diversity: If you’re an elementalist, you’re forced into playing a buff/healbot for your team. If you’re a ranger, you have to play support. As a mesmer, you have to play a condition hybrid. I’m playing a tempest auramancer with staff and we’re at a point where people incorporated this way of thinking so much that they’re like “Oh staff ele? That’s not meta!” in the beginning of a game. And this way of thinking doesn’t come from nowhere.

2) Condition spam. Nothing much to say here.

3) CC spam. Seriously, who thought it would be a great idea to give almost every class access to aoe CC? You can’t even fight 4 seconds without being stunned in this game. Complete loss of control and completely messed up rotations encourage mindless spamming (because your own AoE/CC is obviously as strong as the opponent’s). I find myself just throwing around AoE’s and watching my cooldowns instead of watching the opponent and his buffbar. Because why bother? There are 10000 red circles and effects on the screen, there is no way of getting a clear view of what’s actually going on. I used to check my opponents stability before setting up CC, but now? Just throw that sh** in there and hope you don’t get stunned while casting it.

4) A completely frustrating reward system. A player who loses 10 games straight and wins 10 games straight will get 18 (or 17?19?) pips. A player who wins and loses games alternating will get nothing. Both won 50% of their games, one player is rewarded, the other player is not. What’s the result of this randomness? Players are going at each other’s throats. Never have I seen a system that causes the atmosphere in a game to be that toxic. This is something an intelligent designer would have seen coming. I’m not without sin either. I also quit games in the beginning of fights out of frustration, not because of my teammates, but because of being permastunned for half a minute. However, I understand if people quit games because of their bad teammates.

How to conclude? First of all, please note that my complains are not because of success/failure. It’s about unsatisfying gameplay and a random reward system. So what are my suggestions on how to improve pvp? Well, the current problems came with elite specs. CC spam, lack of build diversity etc. So maybe it’s time to make builds apart from elite specs stronger. Of course this must be done in a way that people can’t just add the buffed skills/traits to their existing elite spec. Which requires deep knowledge of classes/builds. Another thing might be to replace the pip system with something less random. Give players the feeling that they can work on their progress, maybe slowly, but STEADILY. This will improve the atmosphere. But now we’re in season 3 and nothing really changed so.. I’ve kind of given up hope on that.

Oh, and please don’t take the title too serious. The times when teams of 5 d/d elementalists dominated were certainly worse than this. But not much.

They need to reduce the chaos. PvP should become more clear, more tactical. Currently, everyone throws around their aoe’s and the team that happens to be better at spamming wins. This is mainly due to all the skills that came with HoT. But now you cannot simply nerf/remove them. And that’s the problem.

Lol you think this game has GMs?

A matchmaking system causing 50/50 matches is bad? I don’t think so. The pip system is just bad, that’s it. The better the matchmaking becomes, the more frustration you feel because of the pip system. Doesn’t seem right to me.

Arenanet has a very engaged person in their service team to deal with these kinds of issues. Here is a picture of him:

Trying to play GW2 pvp and deal with stuns these days.

http://www.memes.at/faces/bloody_keyboard.gif

I think pvp has become an unplayable, chaotic mess.

MadVisions.4529:

decent idea!
Elemental bastion should autoproc shocking aura, the mines from scrapper hit procs should dase etc…

That’s the spirit! I have some thoughts about how to make pvp great again too:

- Locust Swarm dazes every enemy hit
- Point Blank Shot hits multiple enemies similar to chain lightning
- Unsteady Ground should have unlimited duration and home in on people

Cause now I’m being thrown around and unable to do anything in sPvP only 40% of the time. It should be at least 70%. Thunderclap, Chilled to the Bone, Jade Winds, multiple lightning aura for the entire team etc. etc. where a great idea to start things off, especially considering the visual change to lightning aura so that it’s now basically hidden. Brilliant. At the same time the usefulness of stability was decreased by introducing stability stacks. Very good. But we really need more area CC so I can finish my coffee during stunlocks.

+1 for human (female)

If you play wvw, you’ll be using staff and human female animations are great for that.

Also, GW2 has arguably the most beautiful armor designs among current MMOs and IMO, light armor is the most beautiful armor within GW2. So why would you play an asura ele? Light armor really shines on humans whereas on asuras, basically every armor skin looks like ****.

The meta build (d/f auramancer) works also great with staff. IMHO, staff is a way better choice in spvp teamfights than d/f.

Thought it’s time for a healer-like outfit

Let’s not forget about these awesome “1 pip left for new rank” moments when you hit a premade 5 team with players communicating to each other in teamspeak. Complete uneven matchmaking. Such a fun game!

It’s not great, but it’s also not useless in fights. Which is a great design progress if you compare it to our other elites.

meow one twenty.4376:

No, my point is right there. The only time Ele’s can be killed is in the situations they are most useful in. Is that “I want to be able to 1v1 bunkers” your fallback so you can ignore criticism?

Funny that you mentioned it twice. So I guess this is the way it’s supposed to be according to your logic: “The only time Ele’s can be killed is in the situations they are the least useful.” Right? If the situation where you can kill an ele is the situation he is also most useful in, then that is exactly how you should balance stuff.

It’s not only strong 1v1, it’s only impossible to kill 1v1. Do you not understand that auramancer is designed as a teamfight spec

And in a teamfight, diamond skin is broken easily. So if the purpose of the ele is to pick teamfights, what is your point again? It really is “I want to be able to beat a bunker 1v1”, isn’kitten

Edit: Nice, isn’t#it is being censored.

A tempest can easily burst down by two people. One breaks the 90% threshold and once a condi reaper or condi rev applies his condition burst, the tempest is dead.

So diamond skin really is only strong in 1v1. Could someone please explain to me why everyone thinks that he is supposed to be able to kill a bunker spec in a 1v1?

Any tempest can be easily burst down 2v1 with cc and conditions. You dont even need the cc, just have 1 player break the 90% threshold and the conditions will eat the tempest alive. But yeah, we’re in that strange discussion again where people cry about not being able to take down a bunker spec 1v1.

Tempest opened my eyes. It showed me how bad many of the elementalists skills are designed. Previously, you could pick 2 or 3 skills of an attunement that were worth casting and just switch to the next. With overloads, I have to stay longer in a single attunement. Which means I actually have to use all of the skills. Have you ever noticed how bad earth autoattack is? Or water? I am sitting in an attunement and just spam useless skills just to get the 5 seconds over to get my overload. But it doesn’t matter of I spam useless skills because all I have to do is spam my healing skills. It’s funny though since in almost all of my ranked/unranked games, the opponent team will start a huge flamewar because they don’t understand why they are losing.

Tempest is a huge step back. Yes, it is viable and strong in ranked games. But is it fun to play? No. Elementalist was always fun because of the fast paced nature that came with attunement swapping. Tempest forces you to do the exact opposite.

Same problem here. Arenanet does not test things before they go live…

Played a lot of reaper lately, saw this thread and logged onto my ele to see myself.

What the hell were they thinking? Seriously, Anet is either completely stupid or their organization is so chaotic and amateurish that they don’t realize what the hell they are doing. Everyone who enjoyed playing staff ele before the patch now has to witness this huge turnoff the entire time. Besides, fireball never was the problem. It was the stationary effects that scaled up with boss size.

Since the release of HoT, I often get the bug that I’m rooted to the ground without any immobilize on my necro. Everytime this happens, I have to get into reaper’s shroud and cast reaper’s shroud #2 (which is a movement skill) to be able to move again.

So, currently, everytime I want to join a group (like a taxi for DS meta), nothing happens. I press the button to join the group, but there is no group. No message like “group is full” whatsoever. But I get locked out of the lfg tool because “I joined too many groups”. So I wait a couple of minutes until the button is active again, try again and the same thing happens. Relogging does not help.

I know that this is not the first time I encountered this bug. I remember I had it several times, a couple of months ago. Arenanet, could you pls be so kind and fix this broken lfg tool?

Been trying the build (only in hotjoin though). It lacks sustain (0 toughness and little healing capabilities), so you often end up asking yourself where your 28k hp went after 1 minute into a fight. Killing thieves who dance around you is almost impossible as all of your skills take a century to cast. Good thing though is the might stacking and condition burst IF you can land it. For instance, in a teamfight. But against burst classes like medi guards or power shiro, you stand 0 chance because of the long casttimes of your weapon skills. For 2 years now, every now and then I turn my attention to the condition necro and always conclude with the same issue:

GW2 is a fast paced game, with people teleporting, dodging, blinding etc etc. For 2 actions of the opponent, there is 1 action that you can do. Having the longest casttimes in the game for almost every weapon skill combined with the fact that your skills don’t really do that much and you have to land a full load of them is one of the biggest disadvantages you can have in a fast paced game. This does not really apply to power necro IMO, since dagger/warhorn is a rather very “fast” weapon set and combined with perma swiftness (when using pack runes) takes away the issue of being too slow.

If at this point a Rev is giving you trouble in a 1 v 1 you may want to reconsider your build choices.
Or accept the fact you may not be that great.

Another classic in discussions like this: “You just suck”.#

Aren’t you that same player who kept trying to say D/D Cele Ele was fine before all classes got a power creep?

I was amongst the first people to demand a burning nerf for d/d cele ele. While the class was my main. Criticial considerations of the class you’re playing yourself, maybe you should try it.