I was really looking forward to the dual pistol traits.
Also aren’t we just straight up losing 20% boon duration?
I guess it’s possible that this is a Tempest trait now.
Why was Stone Splinters not rolled into some other Earth trait? Was I the only one that actually used this in a build?
300 is ridiculous, 600 would be fine I guess.
I still hate that most support abilities in this game require you to stand directly ontop of people.
This change has me really bummed out. These two traits were the things I liked best about elementalist.
Please? This trait hasn’t really done anything useful since launch.
I’m pretty sure engineers are actually just as good as GWEN in WvW, it’s just that very few people play them properly.
This would be great. Guilds could have instanced sky battles.
There’s currently no way to get your runes out of this armor besides the extractors now that Transmuation Stones are gone.
It’s possible I’ve missed it and I apologize if that’s true, but I haven’t seen any evidence or even a correct hypothesis that a group of the rich can negatively effect your gameplay experience. I think a clear set of ideas would help me understand and respond to the issue.
All the profits that the Trading Post manipulators make for themselves comes via artificially increasing the prices for everyone else. The TP is a rampant speculation market. The problem isn’t that the rich are rich, its that they extracted value from buyers to get there.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you nerf all the ways of generating money, but leave the Trading Post as is, the only people who will be able to make money are the people manipulating the Trading Post. This is actually worse than letting people farm money with their own labor.
This patch is also just too many changes all at once, many of which effect class balance in a way that is too complex to make huge blanket changes like this. It’s basically like throwing out the past year+ of class balance changes. I don’t feel like sticking around and watching them try to figure balance out again off the new baseline.
I understand nerfing Crit damage from gear, everyone was stuck using zerker, but nerfing Crit damage from Trait lines throws builds out of balance without any kind of compensation.
So your reason for quitting GW2 is that they made a completely necessary change to Berserker gear?
See ya.
They announced they would be nerfing gear. That’s fine. They didn’t mention that they’d be nerfing crit damage from Trait points at the same time. Lots of builds got hit with double nerfs and the class changes do not account for this.
Been playing on and off since release, sometimes more, sometimes less.
I’ve had some fun with the game, but my time is through so I’ll leave my final bit of feedback.
1) Too many nerfs in the patch. These itemization and stat changes really needed to be done before people sunk hundreds of hours into farming for their ascended gear. The class balance changes should have been pushed off until after seeing the effects of the stat changes; a bunch of builds feel double nerfed.
2) Very little permanent content additions since release.
3) Fractals are one of the few major additions and many of them are still plagued with huge problems.
4) WvW never lived up to its potential. Was a huge selling point pre-launch but didn’t receive enough support post-launch to make it a viable endgame activity in its own right. I played DAoC for years and this is no DAoC. Not even close.
Who designed the UI for these two systems? They’re two of the worst interfaces I’ve ever seen in a major MMO. GW2 used to have a nice simple UI for all aspects of the game, now it’s just clunky and makes playing feel like a chore.
Like in that Star Trek movie?
EOTM is actually a really nice map, but it doesn’t incentivize players fighting each other nearly enough, which should really be the point of a new map like this. Everyone got bored of the other maps because it was too much focused on PvDoor. So maybe the answer is actually making kills worth 2, 3, maybe even 4x as much WXP on this map, with a faster reset timer for players to become worth full value on kills again.
Changing recipe requirements around is not content.
No changes for silk or linen at all? No making Elonian Leather useful/valuable?
I still don’t understand what is wrong with the ‘trinity’ as long as it’s not required for any encounters. If people like being healers, why not let them be healers? It sure would help WvW a lot.
Healing has always felt very weak in this game. Why not buff healing?
How about buffing toughness too?
Conditions could, and should, be buffed in PvE.
Vitality could be certainly be buffed, maybe buffed more for classes with lower starting HPs. So if those classes choose to wear points in vitality, they could attain more normal health totals.
All of this sounds better than nerfing zerker. Nerfing zerker is just going to make PvE take longer, and it’s already boring as it is.
This is what I do now. Pretty soon I’ll just uninstall.
Right, but they could bring up the price of Elonian Leather immediately with this change. Or add a second recipe.
Instead of taking 3 Damask each to craft the Ascended Insignias, make them take 3 Elonian Leather, or 2 Leather and 1 Damask. This would help even out the market for all the cooldown items. Right now the Leather is worthless while Damask is 12g each.
Can we please come up with a replacement for this?
I’m thinking:
Empowering Elements: 2% of your Vitality, Toughness, Healing Power and Precision is converted to Power.
We’re the only class without conversion traits as minors. This would help make up for the fact that we lack baseline power from traits because Fire is awful.
Arcane Precision is still very poor too. Extremely bad for a 25 point trait.
I like #1 a lot. Or just make the nameplates shorter by abbreviating the server name. They look absolutely ridiculous.
Evasive arcana on fire-air-earth adept and attunement
Cd range 11-8 on attun swap
elemental attunement on 5 of arcana
renewed stamina on adeptMake those change and u will unlock every kind of builds, sadly to say but imo every one wanna those traits at any cost… it s a must have for any ele build… otherwise this topic is only gossip… u wanna make more viable build just do this modify
I’ve always personally felt as well that Elemental Attunement is a class defining trait. I’ve been arguing to make it baseline or to bring it back down to tier one but the decision we’ve made instead is to bring Renewing Stamina back down to adept instead. This will prevent the dps ele nerf and even though we might all perceive that EA is a “staple” trait we do luckily have options to trait up instead to make up for the loss if you wish to spend points elsewhere. [Elemental Shielding, Zephyr’s Boon, Soothing Mist, etc. etc.] and yes… I know its more than one trait to make up for one but at least they are there and accessible low in other trait lines.
Our hope is not to destroy builds but to make more. Right now the way it looks for Elementalists in PvP is that most builds will still be the same, maybe with a little less AOE condition removal, but there will be more accessible options when going higher in the Fire, Air, and Earth trees.
I personally can’t wait for the Soothing Mist + Cleansing Water synergy. I think I will be enough for me to opt out of taking Cleansing Wave.
Why can’t you just make Elemental Attunement the 15 point Arcane trait? Lingering elements does nothing and ‘fixing’ it does nothing so why not get rid of it?
Here are my comments on what we have seen discussed so far with the warrior changes.
Unsuspecting Foe
I’ve seen some concerns about moving this to master tier. This comes down to the core philosophy that drove the warrior changes for this build. Warriors by nature have a lot of survivability, and we need them to make a choice between heavy control and heavy damage. This trait is a way for them to circumvent that and is therefore build defining. In many ways it exemplifies what a grandmaster trait is all about, however we felt that moving it all the way to grandmaster was overkill, but that placing it at the master tier allowed warriors to still run this with other traits, but have to make some sacrifices to do so.Thrill of the Kill
I’ve heard some concerns about this being permanent max adrenaline in WvW zerg fights. We understand that, but given the fact that this trait competes with Warrior’s Sprint, Vigorous Focus, Signet Mastery, and Inspiring Shouts, we feel like players that take Thirll of the Kill we be giving up a sufficient amount of effectiveness to counter this. There are so many other reliable ways to gain adrenaline as is that I can’t imagine this tipping the scales as much as one of the other adept traits in this line.Hammer
We are taking damage away from the hammer skills that do CC, because we don’t think it is ok for skills to do both of these things. I see a lot of comparison with Greatsword damage, but the Greatsword has no interrupts and a single cripple on the Bladetrail. We left the skills that do not do hard control alone such as Fierce Blow and Hammer Shock, as we are ok with those skills hitting hard because they do not actually disable. We also left Backbreaker alone because it has a long cast time and a long cooldown. The standard hammer build is still going to be very strong after this change, but it will open up options for mace to make a comeback as the control weapon.Longbow
A lot of thought went into the change to combustive shot. This skill was simply too effective at renewing itself. One of the drawbacks of the burst skills needs to be losing your adrenaline, but this skill was easily able to restore all of the adrenaline it lost. Rather than reduce the burn duration we reduced the # of attacks this skill creates because we felt it made it more counterable in PvP and less reliable in PvE as an adrenaline builder.Mace
I highly suggest being patient with this change. I understand this skill did not need an increased cast time in PvE, but this change just makes this skill feel a lot more impactful, and a change of 200 milliseconds of cast increase is not going to impact its use against creatures, but will greatly make this skill more counterable in PvP and WvW. Some discussion here revolved around defiant, which is causing a lot of control builds to be neutered in PvE. We agree and we will start making strides towards solving that in the future.Sorry I got to you guys last, I truly did just go through these in alphabetical order.
Thanks,
Jon
Why the nerf to Burst Mastery? Doesn’t that just hurt other builds too? I realize it’s not a huge nerf, but it doesn’t seem like a necessary one either.
Summation of high risk concerns for elementalist.
Diamond Skin
We really love this trait as it opens up some very powerful potential in the earth line to run a defensive elementalist without relying on healing power. The strength of this build is going to be the ability to quickly string small heals together to maintain that condition resistance. I think it could see use in both high damage builds looking to avoid weakness and blind, as well as in defensive builds looking to tank condition heavy classes and condition heavy mobs. I think the big question here is the base health/armor of the elementalist. Of course if you are just an elementalist you just want us to raise these, but balance must work around some fixed things and profession health and armor are an important part of defining what a profession is so that we can create powerful tools that players can actively use to circumvent these weaknesses. In this case if this trait is not powerful enough to be a grandmaster, I believe the right answer is going to be to lower the threshold, not to increase elementalist base health.Aquamancer’s Alacrity
We moved this trait because all profession cooldown traits are in master tier, and because that is a good investment for this type of improvement. That being said, they may all not be powerful enough to warrant a master level triat right now, but I would rather increase the cooldown to 25% to get people to consider them than to have them be adept tier and allow elementalists to run all four of them.Cleansing Wave
This is the one I am most on the fence about of all of the elementalist changes. It is a borderline master level trait and I think a better solution would be to leave it at adept tier and instead of moving Soothing Wave (which is only moving because it is better to have a 100% worthless trait at adept tier rather than master tier) we would redesign Soothing Wave into something worthy of master level.Arcane Abatement
This is moving to adept tier because all of the fall damage traits are in that tier and in our opinion it doesn’t feel good to have to spend 20 points in a line for this kind of trait. Alacrity was the first choice to swap with it here because of the reasons stated above.Soothing Disruption vs Cantrip Mastery
This one was debated internally for a while as well. I think swapping these traits would also help build diversity as it would let you splash 10 points in water to get Cantrip recharge, but would make you really consider going into water magic for the Regen and Vigor which is much more flavorful. I would love to hear some elementalist thoughts on that potential change.Last but definitely not least.
Arcana
I see the logic in not wanting the two changes in this line to counter each other. Moving good adept traits to master level is contrary to reducing the need to spec into this line. That being said, Elemental Attunement is just a beast of a trait and could honestly be compared with most grandmaster traits. I think a good compromise would be to place Renewing Stamina back in the adept tier, placing is where the other professions get this type of trait, and instead move Final Shielding to the master tier where it could live alongside Arcane Retribution as two good choices in arcane builds that take Arcane Mastery in the adept tier. That could leave some interesting builds such as: 0/30/30/0/10 for fresh air, diamond skin, and renewing stamina. It also still leaves builds that put only 10 points in Arcana a chance to gain Protection by going 30 air for Tempest Defense, and 10 Earth for Elemental Shielding and still have 30 points leftover.I still believe there is work to be done at the grandmaster tier in Fire at the very minimum and that Air and Water are the only truly good grandmaster choice right now. There are also still a handful of just terrible traits that will still get looked at, but we felt like we were already bordering on changing too much.
Thanks,
Jon
P.S. bug fix for Lingering Elements is coming on Nov. 26th as well.
What fix is there for Lingering Elements? The trait is weak by design. Why not just swap it out with Elemental Attunement? Or if Elemental Attunement is too strong for a 15 trait, how about making it the 25 trait. Arcane Precision is an incredibly weak trait, and could easily be the 15 trait even if you were to buff it.
Doesn’t work very well on uneven terrain from my experience. Sometimes it hits, usually it doesn’t. This goes for hills or stairs.
I think they should keep the UF nerf, leave Earthshaker’s damage alone (it’s not that high for a skill with such a long cast time and so easy to dodge) and reduce the Staggering Blow nerf to ~10%.
The change to arcana is lovely, and it’ll open up a lot of new possibilities, but I worry about some issues that might cripple those possibilities. Here’s a few comments:
3.1. Elementalists rely too much on Elemental Attunement or Renewing Stamina to survive. Although it might be worth trying the scepter’s higher endurance trait now that it is at adept, I think the earth traitline should have a… worthy substitute for elemental attunement’s protection. Maybe it could have a stun breaker trait? Rock Solid could get it, but I fear it could make it too strong. Maybe as a grandmaster trait, and moving Written in Stone down a tier.
The changes we’ve done to Ele are actually going to drastically increase the amount of build diversity. The arcane recharge change really does add the flow the Elementalist needed when not spending points in Arcane. This will now allow players to stray away from spending points in the Arcane line. Ele’s will now experience faster attunement swapping as well because they will be down to 1.5s globals when they have zero points spent in Arcane and 1.2s globals with 30 points.
This makes:
13 second recharge on 0 points Arcane
12 second recharge with 10 points Arcane
11 second recharge with 20 points Arcane
10 second recharge with 30 points ArcaneDagger ele’s will now have new specs through Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, and Shared Auras much more appealing, as well as being able to go up the Fire and Earth trees.
Scepter ele’s will be able to play some forms of condition builds, burst builds with more sustain, and even bunker builds.
Staff ele’s will now be able to get blasting staff from tier one and now be capable of going for a trait such as Diamond Skin, or even Fresh air or high up in the Fire line.
Here are some examples of specs I’ve been messing around with:
0/30/10/30/0 (Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, Shared Auras with Cantrips and Dagger/Dagger)
0/0/30/10/30 (Diamond Skin bunker build)
0/30/30/0/10 (Tempest Defense, Diamond Skin, Double Arcane with recharge burst spec)
20/20/0/10/20 (Dps staff build based around sustain from Burning Fire)
0/10/0/30/30 (Generic D/D Arcane build)
0/20/0/20/30 (Generic S/D Burst build)
0/30/0/20/20 (Fresh air build)
Many more..We thank everyone for their feedback. We are keeping a VERY CLOSE eye on this thread and we will constantly be chatting internally until this release drops for potential things to change.
This doesn’t address the fact that current d/d eles need both Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina to go with Evasive Arcana if they want to function at all. This build isn’t even slightly overpowered, so why break it? Why not just replace Lingering Elements, which does not function, with Elemental Attunement, and give us a new master trait?
Not the cast time. I meant the actual time it takes to travel and then land with it.
I’m fine with the damage nerf but would it be possible to make the animation fire faster so that the skill is less clunky to use and more reliable to land?
As Lingering Elements does not even function properly, how about just replacing it with Elemental Attunement? This allows d/d to keep both Renewing Stamina and Elemental Attunement and gets rid of this talent that’s been broken for over a year.
And yeah, windborne dagger is still bad. I’d rather just have the scepter trait work for daggers.
(edited by red.2387)
As Lingering Elements does not even function properly, how about just replacing it with Elemental Attunement? This allows d/d to keep both Renewing Stamina and Elemental Attunement and gets rid of this talent that’s been broken for over a year.
We can’t have Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina together anymore? THIS IS AWFUL.
This is a MASSIVE NERF. This is literally all we had left…
Lingering Elements isn’t bugged. It works. It’s just lame. Soothing Mists refreshes the duration on itself for 5 seconds after you leave Water.
Arcane Precision should be 50% chance on crit, or maybe 60% like Weak Spot.
Warriors start off with such large amounts of survivability for free, where other classes have to gear, trait and utility for it. So while other classes might be able to reach higher DPS levels at a maximum, Warriors can achieve very high damage without having to worry as much about surviving.
All professions should ideally have the same baseline survivability as a warrior, so that it is based on how one specs and traits rather than one’s innate class choice.
The other choice is that professions with lower baseline survivability than warriors should start off with higher amounts of damage. Then they can choose to gear and spec for more damage or they can gear for the survivability that warriors start off with.
(edited by red.2387)
What is WvW like on these servers? Are there people on the borderlands during most hours of the day? How many?
I don’t want warriors nerfed. I would like to see the rest of the classes be as capable as warriors in all aspects of the game.
I just think that this game would be a lot more enjoyable for a lot more people if each profession was as good as Warriors are in general in all aspects of the game.
Warriors have the most hps, the most armor and do close to the most damage. They have access great passive health regeneration as well.
The have some of the better utilities, and all their utilities have much shorter cooldowns than other comparable classes.
My main is an elementalist but I had enough extra tokens and materials to make full ascended gear for my warrior, so I did, and the game is night and day different. It feels like I’ve been playing half a class this entire time. Within a mere 15 minutes of play, I could tell that the Warrior was more powerful and better suited to every aspect of the game.
Since we’re basically forced to spec highly in Arcane anyway, Anet really needs to look at these traits. They’re both incredibly weak compared to the minor traits of other classes at the same tiers.
Why does this cost so much to make? The recipe is more like the materials required for a feast, not a single use item.
I think the staff changes are mostly a solid improvement. You just need to do for our other weapon skill what you did for staff, and then we should be in a good place once you fix our traits.
You need to fix the queue now. It’s absolutely unacceptable to have a queue that functions as anything other than a queue. It’s an extremely simple implementation, every other MMO on the market has functioning PvP queues.