Guild Wars 2

It has become a widespread opinion in this forum that elementalists require too much effort to play, and this becomes clear when we experiment with other professions. May we be newbies or pros, it is clear that we must master this profession to do anything meaningful. And the pro players will tell you right after, of course, if you don’t master the profession, you shouldn’t get any results. But because some of us have experimented with other professions, we’ll quickly notice that even other hard-to-master classes have an easier time in general PvE. Why is that? Oh, in a hard battle, both that Mesmer player and that Elementalist player must “l2p” (learn to play) and make the best use of everything they have to win, surely! But, against normal PvE foes, like that generic wolf outside of your city, why must a Mesmer, which is equally hard to play with, can finish it off with little effort, while an Elementalist player must still fight it as if it was the final boss of the game?

For a moment, I was under the idea that it was all because of the attunement system, and the fact that we have to press more buttons to do anything, coupled with our lack of passive defense. But after analyzing myself playing with a Mesmer and a Guardian, I actually believe we Elementalists are in this stressful situation because of our auto-attacks are not meaningful enough. Think about it:

The general playstyle of a profession in this game has a healthy balance between auto-attacks and other skills. Generally, you try to use other skills at the best moment you could use them, while auto-attacking in between.

A greatsword Mesmer will set up their illusions somewhere around the fight, and then try to keep distance and auto-attack while waiting for the best moment to use their push-back skill, before changing to another weapon. A Staff Mesmer will rely on condition stacking through auto-attacks after they set their combo, a Scepter Mesmer will generate clones with skill #1, and a Sword Mesmer will apply vulnerability with normal attacks and clones before setting up a big burst with blurred frenzy + shatter. Likewise, a Staff Guardian will auto-attack (and use skill #2) while waiting for the best moments to support the party, or a Hammer Guardian will set their symbol of protection by auto-attacking to make better use of it right after. I could go on.

The reason why Elementalists require so much effort, even for easy fights, is because their auto-attacks are not meaningful, exceptions aside. Elementalists die so easily, require attunement swapping so much, must use a lot of skills to burst and a lot of skills to survive, that you are left with little to no time to auto-attack, and when you do, they are just filler, and have little to offer. Maybe a Staff elementalist can throw fireballs while skill #2 is recharging, or even better, keep the foe weakened while waiting for the best moments to set up their earth CC skills. But those are more the exceptions than the rules. To kill your average enemy, you must dance through attunements to survive, and then to set up a spike, and then to spike, and then to survive again, and blow all your cooldowns, even when the enemy is… easy.

It’s perfectly logical that against a hard enemy, an Elementalist player must use everything they have to use, just like a Mesmer or any other must also do their best. But when you go against that generic wolf, and then against the generic wolf right after, and then battle yet another generic wolf 15 seconds later, it’s stressful when every single of those unimportant moments requires a lot of effort for the sake of a normal mob, for the elementalist. While a mesmer, or any other profession, can just slack off a bit and rely a little bit more on auto-attacking, even if they must play well and time other skills right, and this healthier balance between strategic skills and auto-attacking make all non-elementalist professions more fluid to play with in general PvE, give you more time to breath, help break the pace, and simply keep you more relaxed.

I love the light mood, and how laid back devs are in the Ready Up streams. That, and them using the chat room or commenting some of the posts in real time.

It creates a sense of familiarity between Anet and the community, which I think is pretty healthy.

BTW, what were they staring at through the streaming: simply the camera, or some kind of giant screen showing the stream’s chat?

mjharrison.3209:

JonPeters.5630:

Right now I am thinking 85% on diamond skin as high health eles could break this at 80% imo.

There is another alternative:
instead of 100% immunity go for something along the lines of:
75% condition duration reduction while above 75% health

Personally I’d still prefer to see GM traits be actives not passives, eg:
reflect the next 2 conditions on attuning to earth, earth attunement is recharged when afflicted by a condition when not in earth attunement, 6sec CD

If you think about it, 90%/ 85% health makes the trait very active, because it demands from the elementalist to actively prevent as much damage and heal as often as possible to maintain it.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I understand, Diogo, and thanks for the extra info. BTW, I just purchased the instance nodes — couldn’t resist after seeing someone’s fully-spiffed-out personal instance. And I knew I was going to be going there daily after getting the Wintersday Gift Tree, which I had to have — it’s just lovely!

I know it’ll take me a long while to get the money back from my investment, but it does make going out there extra fun now.

You should try sharing your instance with somebody, Gaile. I do it with my girlfriend, and that makes going to the instance even funnier and more satisfying. It gives that feeling that your effort and money is contributing to help other people, which is a great feeling to be had. It’s also fun to use the tonics you get from wintersday tree (do you still get them? I don’t know much about the updated drops) and then both end up playing costume brawl there for the fun of it.

In that way, a hired labour could actually have a serious flaw: your friends wouldn’t probably be able to use it and you would probably still have to manually take them there. But there’s a simple solution for even that: put the npc inside the instance, so that anyone could use it.

…And this talk is making me wish for a instance housing system and a way to officially share your home with your partner. Guild halls are too big and expensive for 1 or 2 people.

Dragonhunter would only make sense if it specialized at killing dragons. But Anet would never design a profession that is inherently superior than others at fighting key story bosses in GW2.

Hey, Colin, has your team ever considered revamping current dungeons to have a structure similar to molten alliance’s, where you have a single path (that maybe generates itself) instead of three different explorable paths? This, to me, seems like it would improve party searching, and even allow more dungeons to be created in the future without stretching dungeon players too much.

Unranked queue is awesome for those that want to play “serious” pvp (aka, not hot join) without being stressed out by rank loss. Players will choose it for several reasons: to experiment builds, to learn how to pvp, to play with friends, to enjoy pvp without having enough confidence in their own skill, etc. Hot join, in comparison, is just mindless casual fun.

However, I’m seriously worried about the removal of solo queue. The original team queue was really bad for solo players, so I hope the system is very strict on picking players, and equally strict on making sure that skilled solo players are only matched with premades of a lower skill level. Still, it’s going to be a gamble, so the risk is there for the pvp experience of those players suck.

Kidel.2057:

I understand your argument, but we should probably wait next beta for this kind of criticism.
With swapping being instant I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.

If the class is strong but just hard to use, then it’s perfectly fine with me. I don’t want Revenants to be overused.

I rather have my profession be hard to use in the sense that it would require skill to pull off (ultimately making it rewarding to master) and not because of some of the underlying systems that happen to feel clumsy, confusing and arbitrary. Mesmer’s shatters are also “hard to use” in PvE, but not for the best reasons.

The best solutions that I can think of to fix the flaws of weapon+legend swapping is to make ventari’s tablet auto-summon on F1 pressing, and to remove energy costs from weapons. This would greatly soften up the amount of “do-nothing” keys you’d have to press in the following situations:

1. When you need to swap a weapon but have no energy left, forcing you to also swap a legend;
2. When you need to swap to Ventari, forcing you to press at least two keys;

I was fine with weapon skills having energy costs before weapon swapping was added, and I can understand the interesting design decisions that can be made with it, but now that weapon swapping exists, I’d rather have legend swapping affect only its respective skillset and nothing else to avoid some of the new problems.

EDIT:
An alternative solution to no-energy weapon skills could be to give energy back on weapon swap too. But implementing that idea wouldn’t be smooth at all:

1. If weapon swapping would also give you 50 energy, netting you 100 energy on two swaps, players would still be motivated to press two keys instead of one;
2. If the 50 energy amount would be distributed evenly between both swaps, each giving you 25, players would still be motivated to press two keys instead of one;
3. If both swaps would reset your energy to 50, without being possible to stack them together, the problem at hand would be fixed. Players would be punished for swapping both at the same time, but then wouldn’t that, by itself, be a bit frustrating? Nonetheless, it’s something that can be avoided once mastered, unlike the double or triple key pressing with the current design, which will be imposed on players by plenty of circunstances.

They do have the golden cave music (for guilded hollow, at least), but last time I picked it, it was bugged and it wouldn’t repeat upon re-entering the map.

Efaicia.3672:

@Rack, that defeats the entire purpose of the class.

But does it?

What is the purpose behind attunements? a) To adapt to a situation and stick to it, until the situation changes and you adapt again; or b) to dance between attunements like crazy to be able to do anything?

Because let’s be honest, with the way the elementalist is designed, it seems like the devs wanted at least both situations to be viable, although it seems they focused more on the former, honestly.

For point a), each attunement has a very specific role, so if you want to nuke mobs and you are not being targetted, then there’s little reason to leave fire, outside of recharges. Of course, you can switch attunements for CC or party defense, but some of those skills are only truly effective with the right utilities and the right traits. Likewise, air is nice to set up bursts, water is nice when you need to fill your health back in, and earth is nice for when you don’t want your health to go down too fast (or for bleeding as a secondary effect). And talking about traits, they seem to be designed with that in mind, where you directly boost the effectiveness of one or two specific attunements you want to stick the most to. Finally, only one of the five traitlines makes crazy attunement dancing a truly fluid playstyle, while four of them are about the player specializing in their favourite attunements.

Here’s the things the community has been asking for:

• More pvp game modes;
• More professions;
• More weapon skills unlocked per profession;
• GvG;
• Guild Halls/ Housing;
• More WvW features and depth;
• More explorable maps;
• More challenging content;
• Mounts (=divisive, but requested nonetheless);
• Raids;
• More dungeons;
• Precursor scavenger hunting and crafting;
• Expanded story;
• Etc.

Here’s what the Living Story Season 2 is delivering:

• More maps;
• Story;
• Cosmetic grinding.

Thieves’ and Mesmers’ current builds will also get nerfed with the weakness buff. Thieves and Mesmers have pretty much been using zerker gear, so they’ll get hit hard with weakness.

Downed state has three problems to me.

The first problem is how it interacts with GW2’s aoe/ cleave-driven combat. In the middle of a teamfight, any player can “randomly” rally everytime any opposing foe is killed. Why? Usually by spamming aoes and tagging all foes. You often see characters entering the downed state and rallying right after two or three times within seconds. And it’s ridiculous.

The second problem is how unsatisfying/ unfair it feels like, after outplaying your opponent and taking their health to 0, when a random opposing player just comes in, rallies their ally, outnumber you, and you didn’t get credit for anything. Some people call it “tactical” and “team-driven”. I’d rather say it simply “doesn’t feels good”.

The third problem is similar. It occurs when, after downing their health to 0, they spam their downed state skills to you and put you down as well, before managing to win out of it. This is not just a balance problem (some professions have better downed states than others), it can also be used to delay/ stretch the duel until a random team members pops at either side. So luck can ultimately determine which one of them gets the kill.

Also, how many pvp games offer that exciting moment where you barely get out of a fight alive, but have managed to beat your opponent? It’s epic and exciting, but the problem number #2 and #3 cripple that feeling.

Ultimately, and in my opinion, downed state is an example of how innovation for innovation sake’s does not makes for good gameplay.

Khisanth.2948:

Riku.4821:

Hmm. I’d agree that Arena Net should probably look at their art bible once more.

I bet “Thou shall only make ugly looking hats” is in there >_>

And backpieces. Anyone remembers how many season 1 rewards relied on ugly backpieces?

I understand that Anet doesn’t wants to divide their community, but I’d say that a new game mode will actually expand the playerbase, not only split them. By putting stronghold into conquest queue, any potential new player that currently dislikes conquest will remain unconvinced by pvp, doing more harm than good for the playerbase’s size.

This game definitely needs more counter options. That being said, the current meta is still too strong and should be, 1) nerfed, 2) require more skill and risk to play. One thing is the existence of counters. Another is the existence of builds that can outplay other builds by stacking aoes or letting the AI play itself.

I’d say that the current 3-utility slot is a bit too restricted, and there aren’t enough good traits for many professions to compensate for it. Elites almost never provide real utility, depending on the profession we’re talking about – they’re almost always “epic” buttons or “kill faster” buttons, so we need to fit our stun breakers and our condition removals in three slots, which ultimately restricts us from most of the remaining utility options. When only some weapons and some traitlines provide meaningful alternatives (usually in the form of condition cleansing – almost never as a secondary source of stun breaking), it means that in order to open up more space to our utility skills, we need to be “stuck” at specific traits in specific traitlines.

scerevisiae.1972:

IMO, Ele should get (a solo version of) Elemental Attunement as baseline, with a trait for the AOE version, and with 15 water heal and soothing mist swapped. It’s really the only thing that will stop pushing Ele into the water/arcane corner.

Forcing every elementalist to depend on regen and protection (elemental attunement’s best effects) is forcing every elementalist to continue to invest on water (healing power) and arcana (boon duration), and forcing every elementalist to be rendered useless by every single boon stripping build in existence.

We need more stat-independent defenses, and we need our weakest defensive skills/ effects buffed. Burning Speed’s evasion and Armor of Earth’s lower cooldown fit perfectly into this.